Bitcoin Boomer Reveals the Truth About $100k Bitcoin

Well, thank you for being here with me on the Trust Factor Show. In our life, it's essential, and trust is such a a big impact on our happiness, our safety, and our security in the world today. And I think this topic that we're going to cover today is very important because trust in our lives is so important now and with so many changes happening right now in our world and in the future. So that's what this show has always been about. This is the 14th episode of this show. My name is Rob Greenlee. And in today's episode, we're going to discuss Bitcoin and the fact that it's, uh, just, it's not just any cyber currency. It's really the foundation of a revolution of sorts. And, and really we need to find out why trusting or not using Bitcoin could shape our financial future, good or bad. So that's what we're going to find out today and really get into the details of Bitcoin and the phenomenon that's been going on. And to discuss this, we, we have a fantastic guest. He's a Bitcoin expert. His name is Gary Leland, and he runs the BitBlockBoom conference that's going on April of 2025. And he's also a Podcast Hall of Famer and was the original one of the co-founders of the Podcast Hall of Fame, of which I'm the chairperson of now, and has been a longtime video creator and has been creating all sorts of content for many years, even like softball and all these other types of content that he's been a, a, a leader in. He's also the co-founder of Podcast Movement, which has been known as the largest podcasting conference in the world, and has really been a lifelong leader in, in business and has been a visionary. And, and many years ago, he pivoted to really focusing on Bitcoin. And I think it's such a timely time for us to talk about Bitcoin right now. So, Gary, thank you for joining me on the show.

Oh, happy to join you.

We've been in the same circles for a long time since Ontario, Canada, or Ontario, California days, you know, when we had the conference out there. That was a long time ago.

Yeah. And you really pulled me aside at one of the podcasting conferences and really was talking about Bitcoin with me. And it caused me a few years ago to, I think it was back in like 2020 or something like that. When I started to invest in Bitcoin. And I think that was still a relatively early time. I think the price of Bitcoin was quite a bit lower than it is today. As we record this, we're like right on the cuff or on the cusp of crossing that $100,000 mark.

And could happen during this show, actually.

Yeah, $99,500. I mean, that's like 5 minutes in Bitcoin world.

Yeah, I can pull this up there's a bunch of different charts. And what's interesting about this is that not all of the exchange charts all say the same number, which is very interesting to me. I didn't really, um, realize that.

So here they are, by a few percent.

If you go to Coinbase versus River versus anyone else, they're all going to be a little different. Whenever I'm doing mine, I use the worldwide average. So it averages out all the charts at all the different exchanges.

Yeah, because the exchange's price is going to vary on how much they got to sell. I mean, let's face it, if you've got 1 Bitcoin left in your inventory to sell, it's probably going to be higher than if you have 100,000 left in your inventory.

And right now, inventories are the lowest that they've ever been in the history of Bitcoin.

So what do you think that means for the price, given that it's the lowest that they've ever been? I mean, does that mean that the price is likely to go up faster?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a supply and demand. It's simple. A simple thing is supply and demand. You know, in the last year or so, we've had one big purchaser of Bitcoin, for instance, or ETFs, you know, electronically traded funds. I'm going to use BlackRock as an example because they're the biggest. They buy the most every day. But they had a gold ETF. Most people are familiar with gold ETFs.

It took—

they've had that for, let's say, 20 years.

Well, Bitcoin, the Bitcoin ETF has passed the gold ETF in one year.

Took 20 years for that ETF to get where it's at. Bitcoin has already passed it in one year. So, and they're only one of maybe 11 ETFs that are buying Bitcoin daily. And BlackRock hardly ever sells it.

The thing with BlackRock is they have so many funds that people invest in, that they put their ETFs in those funds. So they put their Bitcoin ETF, they have the other ETFs they own buy their Bitcoin ETF. So they're absorbing a massive amount of Bitcoin.

Yeah, Gary, this feels like such a massive change that is really, I think, difficult for a lot of people to comprehend. But could you comment really quick about what we're seeing on the screen here, the time chain calendar? .com/en, which is English version.

Yeah, this is a time chain calendar.

A friend of mine made this a few years ago, and this is like a clock going around in a circle here, and you can follow this, the wheel, and every 10 minutes the clock makes a full rotation because every 10 minutes Bitcoin closes a block.

So you can— it'll flash however you set it up to show you a block's just been mined.

You can look at the block, see how many transactions there were in the block. These are a lot of things that geeks want to know. What mining pool won the block, and they would get like 3.8 Bitcoin for that. And then at the bottom, it has a slider. You can go all the way back to day 1 and look at every block, look at the price on every block, how much Bitcoin was there every day. It's got a lot of tools like that that a real geeky Bitcoiner would want to use. This is like a total geek Bitcoin tool.

Well, I think it's way more than the average person would use.

Yeah, I think it's— it is important to think about this, is that we are entering a new kind of paradigm of the financial system, right? And if Bitcoin becomes as successful as people think it is, it's going to be helpful for people to have a deeper understanding of how this all works, and it's very complex. So what does that number 871,529 mean?

This is block number 871,529.

So what is a block?

Well, Bitcoin is electronic files on a computer, right?

And all the Bitcoin, all 21 million Bitcoin are made. They're not being made. They have all been made for 12 years, but they're being dished out some every 10 minutes. And that's how it gets into the ecosystem of the Bitcoin world is every 10 minutes some more gets dropped out. And every 4 years, the amount of Bitcoin that gets dropped out or put into the ecosystem gets cut in half.

So for the first 4 years, you got 50 Bitcoins if you won a block or a 10-minute payout. The next 4 years, you got 25. Next 4 years, you get 12.5, then 6.25. Now it's 3.8.

So a block is all these transactions of Bitcoin every 10 minutes go in this, let's just say, electronic container. I'm going to say It's like having a Tupperware jar, and every time a transaction was made, you throw it in that Tupperware jar. And then when the 10 minutes is up, the lid goes on the Tupperware jar, and a miner somewhere across the world was the first one to do the mining process, and they get paid for confirming those transactions, and another block starts on top. Once the other block starts on top, that one's sealed. You can't get it anymore. It's sealed forever.

And that's called the blockchain.

So, okay, the blockchain is continuous blocks being built on top of each other that contain all the information from all the transactions for the last 10 minutes.

Each block has 10 minutes worth of transactions in it.

And whoever is awarded for, uh, confirming that block, whatever mining company, they get the reward, which I said is 3 and an eighth right now. Mining is a hard thing for people to understand. I have a lot of people who talk to me, goes, trying to understand this Bitcoin before I buy any. I just can't understand that mining. I can't understand how that works.

And I usually go, do you really know how email works? And they'll go, no. And I say, okay, well, unless you plan on mining, you really don't understand how it works. It's not a big issue. All you really need to know is it's been going on for 14 years now, and people have been trying to hack it for 14 years and haven't been able to get into it. So you can rest assured, if you want to just find out about, that's fine, but you shouldn't be going, I need to find that out before I get involved. You should go ahead and get involved and you'll learn that process just because Bitcoin's like a rabbit hole.

Once you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you start learning things that you had no idea before.

You start finding out about banking. You start finding out about Fort Knox. You start finding out about the Fed. You start finding out about what money is.

Most people think they know what money is. But they don't. They have money, they work for money, they spend money, but they really have no idea what money is. And once you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you start learning these things. You have a desire to learn these things, and there's so much stuff you don't know.

You'll— if you're listening to Bitcoin podcasts all the time, you'll hear things you go, I don't know what that word is, right? But as time goes by, you get more educated.

And the only way I have found for people to really get into it and get educated is to have some skin in the game. If you have some skin in the game, you're going to make sure and damn learn what's going on. If you don't have any skin in the game, you're not.

You might, but the odds are you aren't. And then they'll pass you by. So the guy who created it, Satoshi Nakamoto, as he said, when it was like a penny or lower than a penny, he said, you might want to buy some of this.

You never know.

It might catch on. Now it's $100,000. I'd say it caught on. I'd say that was good advice.

So this term mining has been thrown around Bitcoin for a long time, and I don't feel like it's widely known what that really means. And I guess how— what are those servers doing? Because there's very dedicated servers to mining for Bitcoin.

So what are those servers actually— that's a bad term, mining.

They shouldn't call it that.

Okay, but what are they actually— what are those servers actually doing?

There's a— the largest computer network in the world is the Bitcoin mining network. And right now, when it first started, you could do it on your laptop.

I mean, you could be sitting in your dorm room in college using free electricity, didn't take that much electricity even, mining on your laptop, getting 50 Bitcoin every other day. And there's a lot of people in that situation.

But now it's progressed to where you have to use ASIC miners.

Now, ASIC miners, that stands for application-specific mining.

And that means this miner does one thing, all it does is mine Bitcoin.

Okay, but what is mining?

That's what I'm going to get into.

I'm going to get in there. Okay, so if you decide to throw that computer to do something else with that computer, you can't do it. So that's why people can't mine freely anymore on their computers, because it's so technical and you got to have such proper tools.

But really, to be short about it, there's a number out there that exists.

And every 10 minutes, millions of computers around the world are trying to guess this number.

And that's all they're doing is trying to guess it. They aren't trying to calculate it.

They don't have time for calculating it.

They're guessing 1,000 guesses a minute, however many it is. I don't know the amount, but these computers are sitting there guessing numbers over and over and over, right? Every second, 5 billion, 720, whatever. And whoever guesses the number first whoever's computer guesses the number first wins the block and right now gets 3.8 Bitcoin.

And an eighth? Yeah, each time.

Yeah, every 10 minutes. It used to be 50, now it's 3.8. But there are so many computers guessing now. I mean, like, here just in Texas you have Riot Bitcoin. They have the largest Bitcoin mining facility in the United States. This thing is just football fields worth of mining machines stacked to the 20-foot tall. Now they're building— that's south of College Station where Texas A&M plays. Now they're building the world's largest. That's the US's largest. Now they're building the world's largest in Corsicana. I was down there 6 months ago to see it.

The cooling pond for their water runoff is big enough you can put sailboats in it.

This thing is gigantic they're making. But most people don't have that many mining machines as Riot does, so they really can't compete with Riot or Marathon Mining or any of these big guys. They just can't compete with them. So what they do is they all get together and they join forces in what's called a mining pool. And maybe 1,000 machines will have joined this pool. Maybe I have 5 and I'm going to use this mining pool.

You could have 6, you use the mining pool.

And whenever anyone in that mining pool wins a block, everybody shares the revenue. Because one mining machine competing against 5 million other ones, you really don't have that much of a chance. You could, but your chances are slim. So they all pool together in a mining pool and then they share the proceeds and then they've increased their odds drastically.

So what's the reason for that? Activity? Why does that exist?

Well, Satoshi Nakamoto believed in proof of work, that money has to be established by doing work, and that is doing the work for the Bitcoin.

So people go, what's Bitcoin backed by? It's backed by thousands of computers doing work. I mean, if you're running a computer that's mining Bitcoin and it's costing you $70,000 to $80,000 to mine one Bitcoin, Well, it's— you're not going to be selling it for a dollar. So that's where the value of Bitcoin comes in. That's what Bitcoin back is backed by, proof of work. Now you have things like Ethereum, which is proof of stake, and Bitcoin is one of the only ones that uses proof of work.

It's definitely the only one the size it is that uses proof of work.

But proof of work is the only way to do it to me. I mean, it's like if you're a guy working, you know, you appreciate your money a lot more if you're working for it than if it's just given to you. A lot of people just get given money.

I mean, it's like labor, right? It's like labor.

It is labor. You got a cost, you got to run it, you got definitely have costs. And so your selling price of Bitcoin is going to be determined off that. When Bitcoin goes up and they cut in half again in 3 more years and you get like 1.5 instead of 3.8 or 1—

and I'm not going to do that math in my head—

it's going to have to be a lot higher than it is now.

Yeah.

So you can calculate it out. John McAfee, I had talked with him many times before he, uh, died. He had calculated out the price of that Bitcoin would have to be when it hit—

when it got to like, you're only getting like an eighth of a Bitcoin when you mine.

You know, you can do that, you can figure that out.

Every 4 years, just cut it in half.

There's gonna be a point where, you know, I'm gonna use a tenth, have more round number, that a tenth of a Bitcoin is going to have to be, you know, a million dollars, or you can't afford to mine it, you know, because you'll be spending that much. All these machines are just fighting for an eighth of a Bitcoin or a tenth of a Bitcoin. So proof of work is what that's causing. That's what Bitcoin's backed by, is the world's largest mining network on the planet.

And proof of work is what they're all doing, trying to guess a number.

And they try to do a block every 10 minutes. Now people are guessing this number too fast. Let's say the hash rate is how many computers are guessing, basically. Let's say there's so many computers on there, they're guessing the number every 5 minutes. So that's throwing the Bitcoin blockchain off kilter.

It has to be—

it wants to be every 10 minutes. So every 2 weeks, the network will automatically calculate how long it's been taking to answer the question, the mathematical problem, and if it's 8 minutes, it's going to make it harder, right? So it brings it back up to every 10 minutes. So the network's automatically changing the how hard the question is for the people, for the machines to guess, you know, to keep it at 10 minutes.

I don't know if I explained it good enough.

I know what I'm saying sometimes, but sometimes I'm like Trump to a degree.

I weave shit in there that has no relevance.

That's okay.

I'm glad you came up with that term because that's what I do.

Yeah, I think a lot of these concepts are not clearly understood by large amounts of people. I think they hear these terms and they hear this term in reference to Bitcoin, but they don't really understand what's really going on there. I didn't realize that it was basically a a kind of a network of computers that are all trying to guess a number that's established by whom is my next question.

Well, it's by the Bitcoin protocol.

I mean, the Bitcoin, the network.

So where does that live?

It's not a person.

This all happens automatically. It's on every computer that's mining Bitcoin.

Okay. It's a distributed thing, right? That's shared across—

If you're mining Bitcoin, you're downloading the Bitcoin, and every node has it.

I have it on 4 or 5 computers here at my house. Just backing up the Bitcoin network.

I think people are worried about Bitcoin getting hacked a lot, Rob. I hear that a lot. Oh, it's made-up money.

Well, it's distributed, right?

Yeah. Well, yeah. So to get Bitcoin, to hack the Bitcoin network, you're going to basically have to have more computers. You're going to have 51% of the computers that are mining Bitcoin on the network. And if someone's buying that many computers, that many ASIC miners, not computers. There's— these are specific things people are buying. If someone's buying that many miners, everybody is going to know. It's not like you're going to secretly buy enough miners to control 51% of the network, and then you're going to have to start mining with all these. You're going to spend a fortune in electricity mining Bitcoin, and then when you finally got to the point you've done it, you'd have billions of dollars of Bitcoin. So by hacking the Bitcoin network, you would take your billions of dollars and make them worthless. Because once it got hacked, no one would want it. They go, oh, we knew this would get hacked. So you would make billions of dollars that you would throw away. So it would be a, it would defeat the purpose of mining. You wanted to get, you wanted to hack it to get to Bitcoin. Well, your Bitcoin is going to be worthless if you do. And you're going to get rid of billions of dollars that you just made.

Well, the only one that would have a motivation for doing that would be a large country, right? Like the United States.

A large country would have a hard time time doing it, but they still would be— it's at the point that's not going to happen because the miners still would have to accept the new— then, because basically by doing 51%, you've made a new fork, okay, of Bitcoin. You said Bitcoin's going along and you've taken 51% of the power away, so you've made a fork over here. And in this fork, you own a lot of Bitcoin you just stole. Well, the miners aren't going to sit back and go, oh heck with that. They're going to cut off that fork and stay with the old one. So they've got to decide to go with that fork. I mean, there was a fork wars back in 2017 between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Cash forked off and they thought they should— the people there thought that was the better Bitcoin, but it lost to regular Bitcoin because most of the miners said, no, that's not true, we're not going to accept that fork. And that's what would happen with Bitcoin if a nation-state did do it. The miners wouldn't accept it. So it's, uh, the odds of Bitcoin going to a million are way higher than going to a zero at this time.

Everybody's waited too long.

It's too big. Even if the US tomorrow, which right now we have going into the government the most Bitcoin, pro-Bitcoin government we've ever had. But even if tomorrow the government said, oh, we changed our mind, Bitcoin's illegal, you're only making it illegal in the US. The rest of the world is still going to be mining it. China found that out the hard way. They made mining illegal. All the mining companies moved to the US. They were there 'cause electricity was cheaper. They all moved to the US. Now guess what? 5, 6 years later, China realized that was an idiot move. We controlled half the hash power. Now mining's illegal again.

Oh, wow.

Okay. Well, I mean, all these countries around the world, I mean, you think about maybe a shift to the future of currency on a global level being based on this kind of a process that they don't control, right?

Right, right. Nobody knows Bitcoin. It's—

and Bitcoin doesn't care if you're from the US. They don't care if you're from Africa.

They don't care if you're black. They don't care if you're white.

Bitcoin doesn't care anything. It's just doing its thing.

And it's up to you to get in there and do it and take it.

Isn't that a little bit of a threat to the power of governments on a global scale?

Should— yeah, because they want to control the money. Yeah, that's why China got rid of it. You control the money, you control the people. But Here in the United States, you have, you're familiar with this, you have a thing where there's a separation between church and state. I personally think there should be a separation between money and state. The federal government doesn't need to produce our money. Before the federal government started producing it, every state produced their own money. I mean, it's not like something that has to happen. I don't think Bitcoin would affect the US for a long time, but the US Let's face it, we've been the world currency for 100 years now. We've been fiat money since '71. The average lifespan of a fiat money is 50 years. We've well passed that. And the lifespan of a world currency is 100. We've well passed that. We need to do something pretty quick here. We don't want to lose that. And by getting Bitcoin working with US dollars is the best way we can save that. I mean, gold Kids don't want gold anymore. I know people, they're gold bugs and silver bugs, but I mean, and gold is— what are you gonna lug around gold bars with you? You're not getting on the airplane with 5 gold bars, I can guarantee you that. But you know, I can— in Hong Kong, let's use Hong Kong as an example. When China took over Hong Kong, and they didn't take it over, it was given back to them because it was leased by, uh, UK. But the people who had gold bars, I guarantee you none of them got on a plane if they were trying to leave with their wealth. They were holding those gold bars under their bed. But if people had Bitcoin, all they had to do was remember their key phrase. They could get on an airplane, fly anywhere they want, and when they got there, get on a computer and there's their Bitcoin.

So, yeah, or store it on a cold storage drive of sorts, right?

Yeah, but even if you can't— even if you—

I don't know, you don't necessarily have to take the cold storage drive with you. Is what I'm saying.

No, you don't.

Sure, but you get a mnemonic phrase.

Everybody who gets a cold—

Bitcoin wallets are made with a mnemonic phrase that you could fly from Hong Kong to the US, go buy the same wallet you had, cold storage device, enter the mnemonic phrase, and that's your wallet now. Destroyed the one before you left because you didn't want anyone at the airport knowing you had a wallet and saying, hey, you can't leave and your family can't leave until you give us your passwords.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. So you just destroy that. Just memorize 12 words. If you can memorize 12 words, whatever country you get in, you can go buy your wallet and rebuild it with those 12 words. A lot of thoughts have been put into this.

Do you think that is a possibility that the, like, just to use an example, the Federal Reserve here in the United States has a lot of power right now over the fiat currency and the monetary system. They would basically be losing control unless they got in on it, right?

Well, the bank, Mellon Camp Bank in New York, I think it may be the oldest bank in the United States and it's definitely one of the biggest. They, I think they are even, don't hold me to this, but you know, the Fed's not owned by the US government. It's owned by 15 banks across the world, some number of banks, and I'm wrong. I'm always wrong on my numbers, but I'm close enough that, so it's owned by all these banks from across the planet, not by the US government. So I think the bank, New York Bank, Mellon Camp New York Bank, is owned by— is the owner of the Fed.

They are the only bank in the United States that can hold Bitcoin. So they are moving into Bitcoin. They passed the bill, banks could hold Bitcoin. So you would be able to walk into your bank or do it online and say, hey, I want to move $1,000 into Bitcoin, and the bank could handle it for you, and the bank would hold it for you. People are used to being taken care of in their financial systems by banks.

And then Biden vetoed it.

It passed the House, it passed the Senate, and Biden vetoed it. But then out of the blue, I think it was Gensler, Gary Gensler at SEC, allowed, even though that bill didn't pass and banks couldn't hold Bitcoin, Bank of New York Mellon can't, all of a sudden got approved by Gary Gensler to hold Bitcoin.

So, so that's coming. If one bank's going to do it, they're all going to do it. And if the Fed, a bank that owns part of the Fed, is doing it, all the banks that own part of the Fed are going to do it.

So you think that the Fed would do it on the part of the United States, or you think the Fed would hold their own and the United States would hold their own?

I think they both would hold their own. We need to shut down the Fed. I mean, that's what we need to do.

There's no reason for it anymore, right?

Yeah, well, there never was a reason.

Andrew Jackson shut it down. He said that was the most, that was the best thing he ever did for his presidency, for the world, for the United States, was shutting down the Fed.

Then in like 1918, all these bankers got together and made a bill and got it passed during Christmas that recreated the Fed. If people want to find out about the Fed, I recommend they read a book, The Creature from Jekyll Island. It's Jekyll Island is where it happened at, Jekyll Island, Georgia. And the creature is the Fed.

So it's the Fed was created at Jekyll Island. So it's a creature from Jekyll Island. It's a great book. It'll tell you so many things that when you get through with it, you go, oh my gosh, I really don't know how this could even exist today, how we could have an entity that is not controlled by the U.S. government running our financial situation that's owned by these banks.

I mean, that's why—

yeah, it's an organization that drives inflation, deflation of the currency, right? I mean, that's a pretty destructive power that it has.

It's a real destructive power we have. If you take, uh, the US dollar, there are charts that you can look at that shows the US dollar from like 19— I'm gonna say 1918. I know I'm off, but I'm gonna say 1918 the Fed was created. If you look at what's happened to the dollar since 1918, oh my gosh, it's just been going off a cliff.

But we're still plugging along, loving that Fed. And then you hear people go, 2% interest, 2%, um, inflation is good. I don't see anything good about any inflation. Why is 2% inflation? So if I keep my money in the bank for 20 years, 2% inflation per year, you lost a lot of money. You got to make money just to stay even.

Or more inflation if they print more fiat currency, right?

And then the chart the government uses for inflation, if the price of steak goes up too much, If everybody's eating filet mignon and filet mignon goes up to 100 bucks, just like the average person's not eating filet now. So we're going to start putting in the index, we're taking out the filet and we're adding hamburger meat. So it doesn't go up as much as it should because they just replaced it. You know, they replaced the thing that went up a lot with something that's cheaper. And oh, so it's still only 2%. Yeah, but now everybody's eating hamburger. No one's eating filet.

Right.

That's right. Bitcoin flips the coin, or no pun intended, but it flips the chart on that and actually is an appreciating asset. Not an appreciating asset.

It's a store of value. Some people call it digital gold.

And I think, and I think that's a bad— because gold, if you took an ounce of gold and went over the last 500 years, let's say, or how many years, an ounce of gold used to buy a suit of armor. An ounce of gold now buys a super fine men's suit, $2,700 an ounce. So that's like a hedge against inflation. It always stays the same. It's not gaining.

It doesn't really build wealth, it just holds on to wealth.

Exactly.

Gold holds on to wealth. And I'm not knocking people who are stacking gold. I'm not—

that might— that's not my goal at all.

Go—

Bitcoiners and gold bugs and silver bugs have a lot in common.

They, I feel, just don't understand Bitcoin, so they're going for the next—

for something they do understand, which is gold and silver.

But like I said, it's a great way to, to hang on to your wealth. The same amount of gold probably buys a house now that it took to buy a house 30 years ago. But where it took 10 years ago, 100 Bitcoin a house, now it takes like 3 to buy a house.

So that's definitely a big difference in appreciation.

Yeah. Well, let's change gears a little bit and talk about your conference that you're putting on, your BitBlockBoom conference. It's at bitblockboom.com. Here, let me pull it up on the screen. So if you're interested in finding out more about it. I mean, I'm gonna continue this conversation and dive into issues related to trust around Bitcoin, and there's all sorts of derivative issues on that, but I wanted to mention Gary's Bitcoin conference that he's been doing. It's been around here, let me pull it up on the screen. It's been around for 8 years now, right?

Right, we are the, well, first of all, just to make sure it's clear, this is a Bitcoin conference. And as you've been listening, I talk about Bitcoin. I don't care.

There are 20,000 cryptocurrencies, maybe more by now.

I don't care about any of the 19,999 or 20,000 cryptocurrencies.

I care about Bitcoin.

You got Bitcoin and 20,000 cryptos. So I care about Bitcoin.

So my conference is about Bitcoin. And at the moment, at 8 years, it's the world's longest running Bitcoin conference. Sure, there were some before me, but they've gone out of business. So as it stands, I have the longest running Bitcoin conference.

It's 4 days.

Of discussion and events with Bitcoin. It's in Dallas, Texas in April. If anyone is interested and they do want to go, use the code Gary. Give you a discount on tickets, make it easy for you.

But here's the thing with my conference, Rob, is there, and this is how it started. There are a lot of people, and I'm going to use Joe Blow in South Dakota.

Joe Blow in South Dakota got into Bitcoin in 2012.

He's got a lot of Bitcoin because it was cheap to get.

He could even mine it probably on his laptop.

But he knows nobody in South Dakota who has Bitcoin like he does to talk to in a manner that's the same relevancy. They both can relate. If he's got 500 Bitcoin and he's talking to some guy who's trying to buy his first 8, his first $100 worth, they don't have a lot of stuff in common to talk about.

Nor do they have the history to go over of all the things that happened. Well, he loves coming to my conference every year because all of a sudden he's around all his peers.

So most of the people come to our conference are old-school Bitcoiners. Um, and I've always said in the past, if you weren't into Bitcoin, my conference might not be the best conference for you to go to because we were not at the basic instructional level.

We were at the higher level because of the kind of people we drew. I mean, I had more people from the Netherlands the year before last than I did from Dallas.

The same thing, Australia.

I had 25, 30 people from Australia that came. It's a worldwide event. But now we've decided we need to go down that road and start becoming more basic and educational. So we've added like a day full of workshops. What is Bitcoin? A day full of workshops.

What is mining?

So people can find out these questions. So BitBlockBoom is evolving, but if you want to go to an event, where—

and no one's trying to sell you Bitcoin at the event. There's no one there going, I got some Bitcoin you can buy.

Just a matter of fact, someone comes to me and tells me that, I go over and shut them down because they probably shouldn't even have a ticket to my event. So I check it out immediately. So it's a good, safe place. We have Texas Rangers come for security. We don't just use security guys, we use official Texas Rangers. So everybody feels pretty comfortable and secure. But it's a good place to go and learn about Bitcoin or even if you know everything about Bitcoin, it's a good place to go and hang out with your peers.

Mm-hmm.

So let's talk now a little bit about trust in Bitcoin. I think a lot of people are hearing what's going on, that it's going to reach this $100,000 threshold of Bitcoin, and people are hyped and interested in getting into it, but they have this historical memory. Is it maybe they've heard from a friend that they've lost their Bitcoin or there's just this kind of maybe under, under the carpet kind of feeling that they can't really trust putting their money into Bitcoin. And I guess that raises all sorts of questions around how to do it with this longstanding kind of skepticism. And there has been fraudsters in the past and there is risks in, and I think that the industry has been very straightforward about that to some degree. And it's been obvious based on things that have happened in the news that people have heard about that have maybe soured them a little bit to trusting this with their hard-earned money, right, as they think to the future. And so what do you think that people need to be thinking about with Bitcoin here that will help them build, uh, more of a maybe short to long-term kind of feeling of trust around it?

Well, you're correct, it's a lot of stuff has happened in Bitcoin, but let me also state that Bitcoin itself, the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin system It's never been hacked and no Bitcoin's ever been stolen from that.

Bitcoin has been stolen from people after they took possession of it, not from the network. Nope. So, and here's what typically happens. For instance, a lot of people buy Bitcoin at Coinbase and they leave it on that exchange at Coinbase and they don't take self-custody of it because they, for some reason, think that exchange is a bank with FDIC. It's not. Only banks have FDIC, not Bitcoin exchanges. So right now, at some point in time—

I was talking to someone yesterday, I was at a Bitcoin conference, and we were talking about Coinbase was hacked at a time, and they didn't get any Bitcoin from them, but they got a lot of users' information, is what I was told. Like I said, I haven't investigated this personally.

So what they're doing now is they're calling people because they have people's information They know these people have a Coinbase account, they know their name, and they have their contact information. Evidently they have their phone number, and they call them up and go, hi, we're with Coinbase, we have a possible hack going on and we need to help you secure your Bitcoin. And they go, oh my gosh, thank you. And they go, we need to confirm that you are who we think you are, please give us your password and username. And they do it. And then they just log in their account and steal their Bitcoin, right? I mean, that's a big thing right now. People usually give up the information. I was at the 7-Eleven here, and I've known him forever.

He's like, he gives me free coffee in the mornings because I will answer his Bitcoin questions.

One day I came in and said, oh my gosh, Coinbase has stolen my wife's Bitcoin.

I said, what?

Yeah, she went to her account and there's no Bitcoin in there. She's stolen it. They even called her one day. They called her? I said, yeah. I said, don't know, I have a feeling that some hackers called your wife and that she may have given them the username. Oh no, she'd never—

that.

I said, well, you might want to go home and check on that. Next day I came to coffee, goes, oh my God, Gary, you're right.

Someone called saying they were Coinbase and they needed her account number and password and she gave it to them.

I said, yeah, I had a feeling that was what had happened. So yeah, people don't realize— here's the deal in a nutshell. With Bitcoin, I mean, unless you want to leave it on a reserve or someplace, but for the most part, you're your own bank. I mean, you are your bank. You don't have a bank taking care of you because, as I said, at the moment it's illegal for banks to hold Bitcoin except for the one bank. So you have— you are a bank. Now, being a bank is great power. I mean, it's great power.

Oh my gosh.

Why do you think there's a bank on every corner? I mean, being a bank is a great power. You can basically print money. But now that you're a bank, you got to realize with great power comes great responsibility. Whether you want to quote Voltaire or Uncle Ben, but having great power is a great responsibility.

And most people are not prepared for that responsibility, nor do they want to take the responsibility. So if you have, you've got a cold card thing. You've taken it.

It's a Trezor.

Yeah.

And another thing people do is they go to, for instance, you could go to Trezor where you got yours and you could buy it and let's say it's $100 or whatever the price is.

I don't know, nor do I care.

But then they go to Amazon and they say, oh, this guy's selling Trezors for $25. I'll buy one from him. Well, the guy on Amazon selling for $25, $50, $100, whatever, there's a chance— I'm not knocking anyone there, but there's a chance they've already opened the package and got modified. Yeah, modified it so that when you put your Bitcoin on it, they can take it off as fast as you put it on. So if you do buy a wallet, you have to buy it from the company that made it. You can't be buying it from— and then I have another friend, Rob Greenlee. This is Coinbase was getting sued by the SEC. That was happening. So I would contact friends I knew that I had orange-pilled or talked into Bitcoin to tell them, hey, do you still have your Bitcoin on Coinbase?

And they go, yes. And you need to get it off. You don't want that lawsuit to go through and then you lose access to your Bitcoin because they've been shut down.

Had a friend, he bought—

I talked him into buying when it was $6,000. He bought $3,000.

He had half a Bitcoin.

It's $50,000 right now.

He bought his wallet. He had his son come over and help him do it. When you buy your wallet, it makes you write down all the passwords, phrases, and it'll ask you what was word number 8, what was word number 2, what was word— it wants to make sure you've written all this stuff down. So he put his half Bitcoin in there, wrote all his words down, wrote down his username, wrote down his password. Done. Said, with my son helping me, it wasn't easy. Then he called me a month ago and goes, to hell with that treasure, they won't even give me my password. And I said, Rob, they don't have your password. That's why they can't give it to you. He goes, well, I've lost my piece of paper. I'm going, you lost your piece of paper? That was pretty important to keep. Yeah, I know, I just can't remember where I put it at. So hopefully he finds it someday, but if he doesn't, he's lost $50,000, which could be $100,000 by this time next year. It's a responsibility. That's what I'm saying. Most people are not prepared for the responsibility, but that's what it is.

But, you know, now we have ETFs, still not as good as owning Bitcoin, holding the asset itself. That's what you really want to do.

But you have ETFs, you have ways to get into Bitcoin without having to absorb as much responsibility.

But the more responsibility you take, the better off you're going to be long term, in my opinion.

So that's it. Bitcoin has never been hacked. It. It's safe. It's the sloppiness of the people who buy the Bitcoin is the point I'm trying to make that has done—

well, it's also they're probably not educated about how it all works, right? Yeah, that's been my, that's been my experience for sure.

It's worth your time. This is something that's worth your time learning. I mean, people spend more time figuring out how to set up their podcast studio than they do trying to figure out how to secure their Bitcoin. I mean, for real, they just buy it and leave it. Okay, I bought it, it's sitting there. Yeah, it's not insured, dude. If someone hacks into that, no matter what it is, you've lost Bitcoin. And they're gonna go, sorry, we got hacked and you lost your Bitcoin. It's happened, you know, it's not like it hasn't happened. It's happened. I don't know how many times it's going to happen for people to— well, the people who had it happen to them, though.

But then time goes by, and that's what happened.

Time goes by, new people get in, and they all get taken advantage of.

So, so let's play out a scenario. A person loads one of these apps, right? They're able to go in and invest $1,000 or whatever, and they get a fraction of a Bitcoin, right? They get 0.01 or they get 0.1 or whatever that number is that they invested in. And it's held in an exchange, right? That gives you the ability to buy and, and you want to export it out of there into cold storage like a Trezor. What is that typical process that enables that to happen? So when you buy it, you don't necessarily have to do a bunch of setup before you export it, do you?

The exchange makes your wallet automatically.

And basically it's really simple. Your Trezor, you said, or whatever wallet you use, whatever you use to put it in will have an address, a public address. Every wallet has a public address and a private key. Public address is like your email address.

I would send you an email, robgreenlee@gmail.com.

That's your public address. Your password, right, is what you enter to read all your emails. You don't want anyone having that. As long as you don't give anyone that, you're fine. But you would just go into your wallet, get that public address, copy it, go over to the exchange, hit Send Bitcoin, put in the address, say send all. Usually it tells you how much you want to do, say send all and send it. And that's it. But you do want to make sure, you know, just as a tip to people, when you paste that in there, when you take that out of your wallet, that address, and you paste it into the exchange, at least look at the first 4 letters and the last 4 letters on your wallet and make sure you copy the whole thing. Look at what you just pasted in, right? If it starts with B125, make sure that your address is B125 on the thing. So if you check the first 4 and the last 4, it's like 99.9% the rest in the middle are going to be there. You just want to make sure you don't send it to a wallet that is missing a number, and then maybe it's flying out there in, in the world forever.

We were talking about my friend who lost half a Bitcoin almost $4 million—

over—

not dollars, almost 4 million Bitcoin they say are lost, gone forever.

So while we have 21 million Bitcoin were created, 4 million of them are lost forever by people sending it to wrong wallets. Someone threw away a laptop one time that had 4,000 Bitcoin on it, and they threw it away, and it's in a landfill somewhere.

Things like that happen all the time. So that's all.

So really, if you're trying to figure out how rare Bitcoin is, that there's only 21 million, Really, there's only 17 million that'll ever be used. And the guy who invented Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, he has a million that he mined. He didn't even give it to himself. He mined it just like you and I would.

No one even knows if he's alive anymore because it's never been touched or moved.

So really, what's different about a cold storage device, like a little USB stick is what it's like, what's the difference between that and a regular USB stick?

I think it's just made more user-friendly.

For the most part, you could put it on a USB stick. There's a thing called an OpenDime, which is basically a USB stick. If I want to give someone some Bitcoin, I did something with someone and I owed it $1,500 and they said, hey, could you pay me in Bitcoin? Sure. And they don't have, they don't even have a wallet to put Bitcoin on. So I just put it on this OpenDime, which is an upgraded USB stick. And I just handed them the stick. Like in old sci-fi movies, you say, here's the credit stick. That's what a wallet basically is. But you have wallets on exchanges, then you have wallets people put on their phones. Those are still hot wallets. And then you have cold wallets, which have to be plugged into the internet because your keys are on the wallet, which is a whole separated device. You know, it's not on the net.

No one's going to break into your wallet if it's not on the net hooked to the internet.

So you're, you're, that's your top security. Then what a lot of people do, and if you're buying a lot of Bitcoin, let's say you were buying let's say you were buying a million dollars worth of Bitcoin. Not a lot of people go buy a million dollars, but if you were, you're really not going to want to put it on a little thumb drive. You don't have it around where you could lose it or someone could pick it up.

So you'd go to a company like our top sponsor, Unchained. Unchained creates wallets where you have to have 3 separate wallets to get into the main wallet. And so you have 2 and they have 1. So if you lost one of your wallets or one of your wallets broken, they could help you out, but they can't do anything without at least one of your 2.

So your Bitcoin's safe, you know. So a lot of people with high wealth would rather use a 2-out-of-3 multisig, it's called. You have to have 2 signatures out of 3 possible signatures to get into any Bitcoin.

And then it'll have safety precautions like You can set it up and go, I never want anyone to be able to pull more than 5% out of this at a time. So if someone does, by some chance, maybe you got a POS kid and he knows where you would hide that, and he goes in and tries to hijack your Bitcoin because he doesn't care about his parents because he's a POS, he can't take more than 5%. Plus, you can set it up where the video camera comes on and it gives you a script and you have to go, hi, I'm Gary Leland.

I'm moving 5% of my Bitcoin to this address and say, okay, and then they physically review that video.

So there are ways to make sure you're secure.

Just most people don't want to do, as I said earlier, don't want to do the work. And you have to do the work.

Do you see that, that process getting more standardized and streamlined?

Yeah, I do.

They're more well understood.

There, there are quite a, there are more companies every day coming, not every day, but every year. More companies start offering a multisig service. You could use River, you can use our sponsor Unchained, you can use Swan Bitcoin. I mean, there's, there's several of them to choose from that do that, have, you know, the 2 out of 3. And what I recommend people do if they want to explore Bitcoin, and let's say you're not in a situation where you could throw $1,000 or $5,000 or the million we were talking about, go to someplace like Unchained or Swan or River, one of the three.

And you can set up dollar cost averaging, DCA.

Yeah, that's how I bought into it, was just buying $100 a week.

Yeah, that's a stock thing.

That's not a Bitcoin thing.

Yeah, you could do as little as $10 a week or $10 a month, but set up something just like you did so you're buying it automatically. So what happens is you get it when it's high, you get it when it's low, and hopefully you're averaging out in the middle.

But you're acquiring Bitcoin.

And before you know it, here's what really happens though, Rob, with people who dollar cost average. And I can tell you this from experience. When you dollar cost average for someplace, most of those places will offer you an optional email, monthly email, weekly email, as a subscriber.

You want to accept that and sign up for that.

You just got to click the button and they'll send you emails and they'll be simple emails that'll give you information. Almost everybody I have signed up to do dollar cost averaging or talked into it inevitably after 2 or 3 months they've been getting these emails, they got some skin in the game, and I talked about how important that was already.

And the next thing I know, they're calling me up going, hey Gary, thanks for telling me about that, I just bought $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, I understand it now. Or, I just bought $100,000 worth of Bitcoin, I understand it now.

So by dollar cost averaging, you have some skin in the game on a recurring basis. That's the thing, a recurring basis.

And you force yourself to find out about Bitcoin. Another friend, that was the friend that bought the $3,000 worth of Bitcoin we talked about earlier.

He bought that in 2017. I called him in 2020 when Bitcoin was going to $69,000 and said, have you looked at that Bitcoin yet lately? Well, I haven't looked at it since 2017. So he had not bought any more, which he probably would have if he saw what was happening. And he said, oh my gosh, it's really gone through the roof. And so I said, you need to start dollar cost averaging, which he did. Started buying maybe $50 a week. And he called me 2 months later, said, just bought $10,000. Because if he'd have been dollar cost averaging to begin with, though, he'd have bought $10,000, you know, under $10,000.

Right.

Right.

So, so that wasn't—

there weren't a lot of places offering that service back then.

So that's the best thing to do. And I don't care where you do it at, but you start dollar cost.

And I tell people who have a lot of wealth, let's say you got your old boomer like me and you've been working your whole life and contributing and your company's been matching it or whatever.

And you got, let's say you got $10 million in there.

Let's say you're really doing good.

When you wake up in the morning and you look at your portfolio, do you really go into a state of shock if it's down 1%? Do you like pee in your pants and go, oh my God, it's down 1% today, what am I going to do? No, you don't even think about it. You don't even— so why not take 1% and throw it into Bitcoin? Half a percent.

I mean, it's not like you're going to miss it, but you might find that it doubles in a couple of years, which it would more than double it at the rate it's been going in a couple of years. Like I said, beginning of the year here, I think it was like $20,000. Now we're at $100,000. That's 5 times.

Yeah.

You know, I really, I really only tell people about Bitcoin because I really just I'm not selling them any Bitcoin. And I'm not even giving out my referral links, which I have referral links, but I haven't given those out for the exchanges and stuff. I just want people to take advantage of this. This is the first thing ever since our grandparents were alive that Joe Blow got to front run before the corporations front run it. Usually the banks and corporations invest, they front run it, and after they get in the big money coming in, then peons like us get to take advantage of it. But all the big money was made by corporations and banks. This is the first thing ever that the peons got to do first.

Yeah. Yeah. One big aspect of Bitcoin that I don't know that a lot of people have deep understanding of is the derivative currency that exists around Bitcoin called a Satoshi. And that one Bitcoin is really divisible by Satoshis, right? So.

There are 100,000 satoshis in Bitcoin. Satoshi is really a bit. I think that's the official name of a satoshi, a bit. So it's the smallest denomination of Bitcoin there is, but people renamed it Satoshi after the inventor of Bitcoin, Nakamoto Satoshi. So, but I think officially it's a bit, but everybody calls it a satoshi. And that's pretty much the name everybody uses now for it is Satoshi.

Yeah, if you can put your kind of futures hat on a little bit here and think about the trajectory of this, how important do you think that Satoshi is going to become as part of the kind of the global exchange?

Well, there'll be a point in time that it'll definitely be a penny for a Satoshi. And people can do the math, figure it out. So that means that Bitcoin's going to be a million dollars, I guess, if it gets to be worth a penny.

And there'll be a point in time where it's worth a dollar.

So I guess that's when it gets to be $100 million for a Bitcoin, which will happen.

And you can't— while you can't add more Bitcoin, you can't create more Bitcoin, there's 21 million, that's it, that's all there's ever going to be.

And as I said, 17 million available, you can add more decimal spots.

So if a Satoshi got to a dollar, you know, the somebody who's really in a country where a dollar might be your days' pay is going to have a hard time buying Satoshi. So then it would adapt and they would add— Bitcoin Core would add, because it'd have to be approved by all the miners, accepted it, which it would be.

They'd add more decimal points. So instead of being 100 million Satoshis in a Bitcoin, there may be a billion Satoshis in a Bitcoin.

You know, still only 21 million Bitcoin, but it can be divisible by more.

It's more divisible, right?

And that would make it more flexible around various transactions too, right? Because it's a smaller amount per Satoshi. Right? Yeah, it's like what the fiat currency has been doing forever, where we have a dollar, a paper dollar, and then we have quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies, right? So exactly, it's the same kind of approach, I would think, right?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Except then the real dollar, they're taking away pennies, right? And they're going, those pennies have no value anymore, we need to take those off the market because people don't want to mess with them anymore. Where we're talking about Bitcoin adding more decimal places so we can keep pennies.

Yeah, or it's even worse than that, that they use metals to make those pennies that used to be made out of copper, and now they're diluting that to be less copper in them. So you're not actually basing that currency on any kind of a backing of sorts, right?

Yeah, and then the Constitution says that all currency has to be backed by silver or gold, but ours isn't. So actually the currency we use is illegal. Nixon in 1971 took us off the gold standard.

And when he did it, he announced that it's a temporary measure.

Mm-hmm.

And I've watched interviews from the people involved with that who said, oh, we thought everybody was going to go crazy, that the, this was going to cause riots. And no one said a word. There was no slack from the general public.

So guess what?

Here it is, what, 50, 50 years later, and it's still temporarily not backed by anything.

So.

Yeah, now ounce of gold is—

well, you know, you used to have silver dollars. They were made out of silver, so a dollar was evidently worth an ounce of silver.

Now an ounce of silver is worth $30.

It's like, it's like, you know, if you go to the bank to get cash and you get $10,000 out, they have to report it. But really, if you take inflation, that would be equivalent to when they made that law, like taking $1,000 out the bank. They need to really raise it up to $100,000 if they want to keep the same purchasing power that they're reporting.

Yeah. Yeah. So you layer on top of this kind of the changing impact of a potential of mass adoption of such a revolutionary kind of approach to currency and exchange of value in the marketplace today for humans, right? And this, how do you think that's going to impact the wealth of an average citizen in the world and the economies and the financial system as you look to the future? Is there going to be like a really rough transition between fiat and these digital currencies like Bitcoin, or are they going to, or what we're going to see is like an intermediary, which would be like a US digital currency or a—

let's hope we don't have a US digital currency. Trump has said that he will never allow that under his presidency. I hope that continues past his presidency with whoever, Republican or Democrat. Because for instance, in China, they have a Chinese digital currency. And if you're doing something that they don't agree with, you're posting things against the country, they just can lock up your account and you can't get at it. Where at least with paper dollars, you could have paper dollars and you could still spend your money. You know, it really does, I think, control the population too much, having that much control over money, but they'll never state that's what it could do, but that's what it could do to me.

But I think, Rob, we're getting ready to see the—

well, I know this isn't a thing.

We're in the process of seeing the biggest wealth transfer that has ever happened.

All the boomers are dying eventually, gradually, slowly. I'm 70. What, I got 20 years left if I'm lucky? Probably if I made it 100, I wouldn't even care about that last 10.

But all the boomers are dying. And again, it's a fact.

Boomers grew up in the best financial conditions the world has ever had, I think. You know, unemployment was low.

Everything was just great. Most of them have, not most of them, but a large percentage compared to other age groups—

millennials, Generation X, or whatever—

there's a lot of money in the bank that these boomers own. And as these boomers die and their kids get this money, well, they aren't going to want to keep this stuff the boomers have got their money in.

They're going to move it all into cryptocurrencies because they understand it. Boomers might not understand it, but the younger generations do, and they're going to put it into there. They probably aren't going to be buying gold because they don't want to lug that stuff around. That's their granddaddy's money. They're going to put it into money that they understand. And so we're going to, we're going to see that shift right there. Even if boomers don't get into it, all their money is going to go into it sooner or later. It's just going to be their kids or grandkids that are putting it into it.

So, you know, when you got Bitcoin, here's the deal. You got a dollar.

I'm going to give you kind of a scenario here.

You have the US dollar. Then you have sites like PayPal.

There's a layer over the dollar.

That's a layer. You get base layers of dollar. Yeah, PayPal, all these things. Then you have another layer, credit cards and all these companies. That's another layer. Then you have another layer that's ETFs and stocks and stuff. So you have all these layers that are based off of, you know, using the US dollar, which is the world currency, as their base layer. That's being built right now. You have Bitcoin, then you have exchanges, Then you have Bitcoin ETFs, and you have companies that will let you store your Bitcoin there, and they'll give you a card, credit card. Go buy something, you use the credit card, and behind the scenes it converts your Bitcoin to dollars and pays them. So all these layers are being built. This is a big thing. This isn't like people— a lot of people who understand Bitcoin thinks it's just some guys in the basement. I got some Bitcoin, I'm gonna send it to Joe. This is a major industry. And so that's why I say the odds of it going to zero Or the odds of it going to a million are way more than it going to zero now.

There's too many big corporations and companies and too many people that have it for that to happen.

So speaking of boomers, that is a generation that's approaching retirement, right? And I've also seen a lot of statistics that have pointed to the fact that a lot of boomers haven't really adequately prepared for retirement and having enough money in their IRAs or their investments. And is Bitcoin a potential solution to this retirement dilemma? And is it too late to get in?

It's not too late to get in.

People are scared of that. Let's put it this way.

It's $100,000, but you know, the people who bought at a dollar said, I was late.

I could have got it at a nickel.

People bought it at $100 and said, oh, I'm late.

I could have got it at a dollar.

People bought it at $1,000 and said, I was late.

I could have got it at $100.

People at $10,000 said that, and the people at $100,000 will say that. No one, I don't believe anyone in the history of Bitcoin has bought Bitcoin and said, oh my gosh, this is the best time ever. I am so smart. I got it. Except for the people who are mining it when it was a penny. And they didn't know if it would even have a value ever.

They were just geeks that were just doing it because it was, it could be done.

So no one has ever bought Bitcoin thinking it is the best time, but everybody has thought they were late to the game who's ever bought Bitcoin. And only like 3% maybe of the planet even has any Bitcoin. So if only 3% of the planet— I truly believe, and I may be dead before this happens because like I said, I'm getting old, but I believe that if you bought Bitcoin still at $100,000, 10 years from now your grandkids will go, granddaddy, how did you know to buy that Bitcoin? 'Cause we're all like getting our colleges paid for and our houses paid for and stuff. How did you know that? And that's what's going to happen even at $100,000.

Because like I said, only 3% of the population has any.

Yeah. So how do you think that this is going to go? I mean, how are more people going to be able to participate in this? Because if we're transitioning over to having an economy that's based on really transactions related to Bitcoin, then we're going to need to have everybody involved, right?

Well, everybody will get involved sooner or later. Just everybody gets the price they deserve.

It's the same. If you don't want to take the time, if you want to be the little boy who cried cheap, keep missing it, that, that's fine, but you're going to get a worse price. Like I said, it certainly is not expensive to buy Bitcoin. I mean, yeah, a whole Bitcoin's $100,000.

Not a lot of people for that, but you could buy $5 worth of Bitcoin. It's not expensive to buy Bitcoin. They, you will buy it sooner or later, but it's just according to whether you, how much you want to get for your money.

Right. And that's kind of part of my bigger question is that as we look to the future now, granted boomers have a shorter life expectancy than like maybe a Gen Z or somebody like that, or a Gen X or any of those folks have much more time ahead of them. But do you think it's increasingly going to be important for participation in the economy to have everybody have a piece of Bitcoin? And how much do you think they should own today or in the next year to make sure that they're participating in this anti-inflationary medium?

Well, it used to be that everybody's goal was to get 21 Bitcoins. That was the goal because if you had 21, only a million people could have 21 Bitcoin.

So that used to be the goal.

And then that got hard to do for— so for some reason, right, I think the number was 12.9.

I don't know where the hell that came from, but that was the number everyone was banding around.

Now it's 1.

Your goal is to try to get to 1 Bitcoin, but a lot of people are saying your goal is to get to 0.1 Bitcoin.

So we're starting to see that come up, that 0.1 Bitcoin can make in 10 years your retirement, whether you retire or not, that you could retire in 10 years on 0.1 Bitcoin. The problem is though, is people confuse it with a stock and they go, oh, I'm going to buy this and I'm going to sell it when it hits $100 and rebuy it and sell it and rebuy it. Well, first of all, it's a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week market. It's not like a stock market opens up at 9:30 and closes at 4 or whatever. This is 24 hours, 7 days a week. And then if you take every year for Bitcoin, and as I keep saying, my numbers will be wrong. But it's something like there are 20 days out of the year that Bitcoin makes 50% of its growth, or maybe even a higher percentage than that. Like, so if you're not in on those days, you're not going to make the money you should make. So really, I'm not a trader. I don't buy and sell Bitcoin and try to— I'm an investor.

I buy it for the long run.

I'm 70. I bought Bitcoin yesterday. I've been buying it since 2017, and I bought some yesterday. Because I wanted to buy some at $90,000. I realized I hadn't bought any at $90,000.

I will always buy at the high personally because I know it's going to go higher. So there's no point in time I'm going to go, it's too high, I can't buy it anymore.

It's—

I'm always going to buy Bitcoin because it's always going to go higher. It'll go higher until I'm dead, and then it'll continue going higher and I won't care about it anymore.

So is there any point, or what would trigger you to sell some of your Bitcoin?

Well, that's a good question.

I was talking to someone the other day who has been in Bitcoin, gosh, since it was probably $5. So we can relatively say they have a lot of Bitcoin.

There's an upside. Yeah.

Yeah. And they have sold none.

I've never sold any.

I've only acquired. I'm fortunate I'm in a business or have been in a business where I've made enough money to live off of and I didn't need the Bitcoin and I could take my excess and buy Bitcoin. So that's very fortunate.

Which she's been very fortunate.

And we were talking this—

I had never heard this. This actually made me laugh.

She goes, Gary, I am sick of being Bitcoin poor. So because she's got millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20 million worth of Bitcoin as long as she's been in it.

But she doesn't have any money except for what she makes it work because she doesn't want it.

It says every time I tell some people I'm going to sell it, they go, no, you can't sell it, you can't sell it. But, you know, really, I'm waiting to see her again because I think I came up with a solution for her. She's at the point now she has so much Bitcoin, she could pull out 5% a year.

So she's going to pull out $1 million a year. I'm just guessing in numbers here. I'm not doing the math.

But her Bitcoin is going to go up 50% a year. So pulling out 5% a year, she could never run out of money. I mean, literally, she could never run out of Bitcoin. I mean, literally, because she's going to, you know, it's going up at a much higher rate than she's pulling out. So let's say she pulled out a million this year, Bitcoin doubled again next year, she bought up 5%, she's pulling out 2% to me. So I think that's if you're doing it long term, you want to save it and you want to buy as much as you can and save it as long as you can.

But then there'd be a point where you go, okay, I'm ready to start living, I'm ready to start traveling.

Maybe you want to be able to take your family to Europe for a week and pay for everybody's flights and hotel rooms once a year. Maybe you want to build these memories.

You're certainly still at that point going to leave your kids plenty of Bitcoin, plus they'll have all these great memories. Because really, you know, yeah, I, I feel like I have a long time to go, but I'll probably start doing a strategy like that soon where I can— I live fine now, I have a fine life, but yeah, I'm not flying my whole family to Europe for 2 weeks at the moment. I still fly regular class, not even first class.

I believe that you need to— if you're a young person, you need to quit going out spending money on liquor or pot or e-cigarettes or stupid stuff, going to concerts. You need to, for the next— if you're 25 years old, you need to next—

for the next 10 years, save every penny you can save and scrimp and just buy Bitcoin with it.

If you do that for 10 years, quit peeing away your money. And that's what you do when you go out drinking, you're peeing away your money, literally. You need to quit peeing away your money and put it in the Bitcoin, something that's going to grow and you're not going to miss it. And yeah, maybe you can't fly to a wedding in Denver for your buddy that was like just a buddy, not your best friend. Maybe you can't do some things. Maybe you can't buy $200 pair of jeans. Maybe you can't buy a new car every year. Heck, I can afford any car I want. I mean, I literally can afford any car I want to buy, and I'm driving like a 15-year-old Mercedes. And why?

Because I'd rather put my money into Bitcoin. That car, that's fine.

I don't need—

I don't need to show off to anybody. Yeah, you don't need a— you don't need to buy a Rolex watch.

Buy more Bitcoin with it. Buy more Bitcoin with it.

In 10 years with it, you can buy the presidential Rolex instead of the starting Rolex.

But that's what I try to tell people.

Quit pissing your money away and just for 10 years put it into Bitcoin, and your life will change drastically.

So how do you think this is going to impact value in the market, right? So as you think about— so let's say I own 1 Bitcoin, it's 10 years from now, it's worth $1 million, or yeah, I mean, that's a possibility that it could be.

Yeah.

And how does that cause the world to maintain, I guess, value, right? So if you think about Do you think that'll create a world where the cost to buy things will escalate, right? So instead of like today being able to buy a car for $50,000 US dollars as well as $50,000 worth of Bitcoin, do you think that having all this wealth and abundance in, in Bitcoin will inflate the market and then actually reduce the buying power of those that convert?

Yeah, I don't, I don't really see that happening. It could be, but I see more as Bitcoin as not creating more wealth, it's redistributing the wealth from where it's at now.

That's what I see.

So, okay, and that's in my picture is, okay, there's still all this money out there, basically same amount, but now it's gone into the hands of people who would have never had it before.

And that's what I got to earlier. Common Joe's got to front run this. Corporations just make it. So if this Bitcoin had been owned by all the corporations for, it's just like a stock using this example as a stock.

Would we be worried? Oh, they, this new stock came out and they all made all the money off of it.

So we're going to have a lot of inflation because these banks made all this money. So I don't see that. Like I said, that's the thing is this is the first time we've had a chance to be the victors to take advantage of something. So, so, so I don't see it happening that way, which I guess it could, but I haven't envisioned that.

Yeah, so if there's a chunk of the population, let's say a third of the whole world population never gets connected to Bitcoin or Satoshis or anything like that, is that a catastrophic outcome for a big chunk of the world as we move into the future here?

No, because I still think they will get involved because we'll add more zeros and make it cheaper for them to get involved.

Got it.

So Bitcoin will pretty much, I think, always be affordable. To get into, it's just the amount you're getting is not as much and it's gonna take more time.

And, and there'll be a point, let's face it, there'll be a point that it's gonna quit going up 400% a year.

The higher the number is, the higher the number is, the less volatility there is.

When it gets to—

it's the same thing with stocks too. Stocks have that dynamic to them too.

So yeah, when it gets to $1 million, it's not gonna be near as volatile as it was when it was $100,000.

Right.

And actually, now you have— now that you have the ETFs and stuff, they're not like in these corporations buying these banks. They're not like trading. They're investing. Retirement fund goes into our state right now. State of Texas is talking about buying, uh, strategic reserve. Pennsylvania's putting together a program for street. Wyoming's putting together— I was talking to the guy yesterday who did all the writing for the putting this strategic reserve for Wyoming. They want to be the first state to have the reserve, to have a state reserve. Texas is the same thing. They want to be the first state. This is going to happen. These states are fighting to be the first one to have a strategic reserve. When it gets— those people aren't selling, they aren't buying Bitcoin to trade. So as all that Bitcoin gets with these entities, the amount of ups and downs and ups and downs is going to drop.

The volatility is going to drop drastically.

So that's why people need to get in now. Volatility is a good thing. People go, oh, it's too volatile. Yeah, it is volatile. That's why everybody's making so much money. It wasn't volatile, everybody wouldn't be getting rich off of it, right? Um, but so volatility to me is a good thing. Now, are you familiar with MicroStrategy?

I am, I am.

Yeah, MSTR. Someone— if someone has money— yeah, because one thing that does happen, Rob, if you've got all this money in retirement, you're a boomer, and you pull it out and cash it out, you're paying capital gains, long-term capital gains. So you're taking a hit. So you're taking a hit to pull it out and put it in Bitcoin. But right, right off the bat, you're in the hole because you paid the capital gains. You could put your Bitcoin into MicroStrategy, for instance. MicroStrategy owns 320,000 Bitcoin. Their whole purpose of being a corporation, just about, is to buy and hold Bitcoin. They're never selling their Bitcoin. They just buy Bitcoin is all they do. That stock is going up like no tomorrow. I mean, it's already had a 10-for-1 split.

It'll probably have another 10-for-1 split.

So I recommend people look at that. And let me do say this, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm just telling people things that I look at. Make your own, but I'm not telling you anything. I'm telling you what I know of the past, what I think about the future, and you can use that information just to educate yourself and go do whatever you want to.

But MicroStrategy, I think, is an excellent way, or even an ETF.

You got to get some skin in the game. You really do.

Yeah, I've heard some people say that maybe a good way of taking out your value out of Bitcoin would be to take a loan against it. Would you advise against that?

I've done that. And here's the thing about taking a loan against your Bitcoin that you have to be concerned about.

Number one, you're putting your Bitcoin up as collateral, right? Let's say you want $100,000.

You're going to put up— they're probably going to make you put up $300,000 worth of Bitcoin, maybe $400,000 worth of Bitcoin to get that $100,000. Because if Bitcoin does go for a drop in a bear market, you'll have a call. They want to be covered on that.

But it could be to a point in time I did it, Bitcoin was $40,000 and I thought it was going to continue going up.

I said, okay, it's a great time.

And no, it didn't.

It, the bottom dropped out of it.

So all my extra reserves I had weren't enough. Luckily, I had enough Bitcoin that when they called me and said, hey, you don't have enough Bitcoin in here, you need to add more, I was able to add it.

If not, I'd have lost all my Bitcoin.

So people need to make sure they're aware of that. While Bitcoin seems to always be on an upward trajectory, it does have bear markets. There are bear and bull markets every 4 years. There's a cycle. And you can look at this.

All you have to do is, is look at the long-term chart on it and you can see it.

You can see we're at the beginning of the bull run. So you need to— you just need to be aware of that. And another thing you have to consider is someone else is holding your Bitcoin. And we've always— and that is the most valuable asset on the planet. There's only 21 million. Nothing is as limited as that. Gold is not that limited. Guess what? When gold goes up to $5,000 an ounce, I guarantee you they'll be getting more than gold than they could because they couldn't afford to mine this particular gold at $2,000 an ounce, but they can afford it at $5,000 an ounce. So gold, more expensive gold gets, the more gold it comes on the market. But Bitcoin doesn't matter what happens, no more is coming on the market. It's, it's right, you know, cut in stone. So you can do that.

It's just like I said, you need to just be safe. Two things.

Number one, you got to have enough Bitcoin for the calls in case it drops.

And number two, you got to realize you're giving someone else your Bitcoin and they have control of your Bitcoin, not you.

Yeah. So all you have to do is look at the chart. I've got the chart up on the screen here and you can see what I'm talking about or what we're talking about here. The volatility is very significant. This goes all the way back to 2011.

Well, look though, but go to 2011, push that back to 2011 for me.

Yeah.

Is that 11 cents?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, now come out here to 2017. Put it on 2017. That's what everyone wants to see.

It would be right here.

Okay, this is 2017 you're looking at now. This is the year that on Thanksgiving it was $7,000, Christmas Day it was $19,000, and it seemed like the end of the world when that drop happened. Oh my gosh, it was the biggest thing going. It was as big as this candle here for today, the one all the way to the right at the time. But now look at that candle where it dropped from 20 down to 3. You can't even tell. It's nothing, right?

It's gone.

Yeah, it's a blip on the thing. And it went that year from 7,000 Thanksgiving to 19,000 by Christmas and then dropped to $3,000.

That's the—

and it's a blip.

That's the low point right there. Yeah, $3,200 was the— what was the low point? After being at $17,000.

People— and actually, that's this particular exchange. I think most people would agree it hit $19,000 at the high. So yeah, so like I said, that's just a— but, and I know how many people sold their stuff at that. And well, actually, Todd Cochran sold his at $20,000, and he—

we talked about that online on the show, I believe. So I don't think that's the secret. You might check with him. You might need to cut that out. I don't want to make him look bad.

That's okay.

No, but he said it online, so I feel like it was—

yeah, he did. He did. He said it to me before. And then also on 2020, it looks like it was at like $10,000, a little over $10,000. And then immediately it shot up to what the peak was?

$69,000.

$60,000.

Yeah. Yeah.

In, in one year.

I remember that. Yeah. That was quite an exciting year, actually. That was an exciting year.

And so when it jumps, it really does, but when it crashes, but One thing you can see, though, if you look at this chart, that the crashes every time, every 4-year cycle are not as high. While we did have it go from $20,000 or $19,000, whatever it said, $17,000 to $3,000, $3,200, that was whatever percent that was, 70% or whatever. The next time maybe it went down 60%. A stat that I saw this week that I did not know is that whatever the price of Bitcoin was For Bitcoin, always the end of the halving, first of all, is always on the presidential election year. First of all, so every halving ends and a new one starts where the price of the amount of Bitcoin you're rewarded for miners cuts in half is election year. So first of all, so every 4 years there's an election year, and whatever the price of Bitcoin was when the president was elected, Bitcoin has never gone below that again, right? So if Bitcoin was $80,000, I don't even know what the price was when—

or let's go back further.

When Biden was elected, if it was like $30,000, it never dropped below that again. If when Obama was elected, it was $20,000, it never dropped below that again.

Now we're probably talking, I'm going to guess, $75,000 when Trump was elected.

So we can pretty much feel if past history continues, it shouldn't drop below that again.

So yeah, I just heard that stuff. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

And I think if you look at the chart, I think it was right here at the lowest point was at the high point back in 20— what, 2017? So you could say it doesn't drop below the last high, right? Back in the past. And then it, ever since then it's been very volatile, but it's been steadily going up.

Right.

Yeah, and like I said, the higher it gets, the less volatility there's gonna be. It's just a numbers thing. It's like some formula, something to do with big numbers. Yeah.

Also, there's a thing and I can't think of the name of it now.

Gosh, I can't name it. There's lots of these laws or rules of finance and things of the world that people quote that are true.

And there's a thing, I can't remember the name of it, but it has to do with big numbers. That the more valuable something is, the more people want it.

Now that Bitcoin's $100,000, more people want it than it did when it was $100.

It's like Louis Vuitton purses. More people want Louis Vuitton purses than they do just a regular purse.

Some theory of high numbers, right? And people feel more confident when the incoming president of the United States says that the US government's going to get on board and and all these big companies and other countries around the world are interested in stockpiling Bitcoin, that tells you that there's momentum behind this that is far beyond what a normal cryptocurrency has, right?

Yeah, we're talking right now, Trump's talking, he wants to buy, with the help of Senator Lummis out of Wyoming, she submitted the bill, they wanna buy 200,000 Bitcoin, not $200,000 worth, 200,000 Bitcoin per year for the next 5 years.

Get us a strategic reserve of 5— of a million Bitcoin so that the US government is holding.

So that—

and then now he's also talking about having a crypto czar, someone to be running that part of the economy, the cryptocurrency economy.

So this has got to be the most friendly Bitcoin team or—

yeah, whatever, not necessarily the president.

I mean, I think almost everybody who's involved owns some Bitcoin.

I mean, I think everybody does. So they're not like going, oh, this is terrible stuff, let's, um, make it illegal. So this is gonna be— I feel Bitcoin should do as good as it's ever done, if not better, under this group of people as far as Bitcoin goes. Whether everything else goes good or not, I'm not saying, but I do think Bitcoin This is the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin was going to do great anyway, no matter who won, Rob. Right. Because I don't think it can be stopped at this point. I just think with this group in there, it's going to do great faster because they're all so pro-Bitcoin that it's going to do even faster.

But I think when it comes to a year or two years from now, it was going to do good anyway. But it doesn't matter because you can't kill it.

Even if you cut the internet off for the whole planet, whenever you turn it back on, your Bitcoin would be there.

And if that cut off, you got way more to worry about than your Bitcoin.

I would say that the people that should be worried is probably the people inside of the Federal Reserve, because, yeah, they should be.

I wish we— like I said, I, I wish they could just shut it down.

Yeah, well, that may be the—

I've always been just trying to audit it his whole life, I think, you know.

Well, then that might be the result. It may take many, a decade or so maybe for that to happen, but it's, it, that actually may be the outcome. We may be seeing the birth of an entirely new financial system.

Well, like I said, Andrew Jackson said that was the greatest thing he ever did was under his presidency was get rid of the Fed. Then they stuck their head up and came back. Didn't kill it off good enough.

Right, right. Well, we'll see what happens. I think that probably will happen after you and I are probably gone, but yeah.

I think it'll be—

you never know. I mean, it just depends on how all in everybody gets.

Sure.

But like I said, this is the most revolutionary thing that's ever happened to finance. I mean, let's face it.

I agree with you.

It's the first time you've had money that can't be inflated away. It's the first time you had money that you are in control of. No one can take your money from you. Um, they can if you're foolish, but if you're smart about it, it's the first time you've been able to—

let's think, I know a guy whose family— I know a couple of guys, and actually I know quite a few people. Now I'm thinking about that their families, when they were little kids, fled Russia for the United States, and they were able to leave with like $10.

They had to leave everything behind.

Where if Bitcoin had been around, they wouldn't need to carry anything with them.

All they got to do is get to their destination, and they would have arrived in the US with their fortunes intact. Instead of having $5 and starting all over from scratch.

And really, don't we want all that money coming into the US instead of us sending it out all the time? Bitcoin should be great for the US because as people come, they're coming with all their wealth, not having to leave everything behind because the government wouldn't let them go on the airplane with their wealth. So it actually— the US should be controlling Bitcoin. We should be controlling Bitcoin. We should want it all here. That's what's gotten me about a year is us being so negative as a country toward Bitcoin. We need to embrace it and adopt it and get it all in the United States and control, like, where the world money supply— well, Bitcoin's become world money. We need to have it all here.

Right. Well, all of the citizens of the United States, as well as all the organizations that exist in the United States owning a share of this, will create a robust economy. I think ultimately in the long run, and you start thinking about the technology layer that's coming with robotics and automation and all this, I mean, you can envision this, this thought that Elon has put out, Elon Musk, the CEO of X and Tesla, his vision for what the future looks like is excessive abundance, right? So you combine Bitcoin with robotics and automation, and, and unlimited energy of sorts. And you can really see how we might be in the early stage of formulating a whole new type of civilization. That's, that's very self-sustaining, very solid. People have the ability to live good quality lives. My worry is that there's going to be people left behind.

Yeah. And, and like I said, I think people will always be able to get into it.

But you're right, there are going to be people who are not buying it now, who won't buy it when it's $200,000, that won't buy it when it's $1 million, and they're definitely going to be getting less of it than they could have gotten. So they will, in that case, be left behind.

Something else that we haven't covered is that I don't think a lot of people understand that Bitcoin is— well, let me say, the internet has a ton of protocols.

There's a protocol for audio, there's a protocol for video, there's a protocol for photos, there's a protocol for everything. Everything has a protocol.

But what was the one protocol that the internet did not have, that no one had built, no one could figure out how to build it no matter how many of them tried, was it was a protocol for money.

And Bitcoin was the protocol, the missing protocol that needed to be out there, a protocol for money.

Sure, there was money you could use PayPal, but that wasn't internet protocol.

That's a third party doing it.

So that is what is so fascinating about Bitcoin is somebody finally figured out how to make the missing protocol. So if you were like me, I started building e-commerce sites back in '96.

You were really interested in a protocol that didn't exist for the internet. I mean, that's what got me into it. I didn't get into it because I go, oh, maybe I can make a lot of money someday. But I started finding out it was the internet protocol that was missing. That was like, oh wow, this is definitely going to be successful. And that sounds like a pretty simplistic way to think about it, but that's how I thought about it originally. It's just the fact that it was an internet protocol and that protocol did not exist and it was a protocol that was needed. So, yeah, that's a big deal to me.

Yeah, I agree. Well, Gary, it's been great to have you on the show on TrustFactor. I think we've hopefully built a little trust out there about about Bitcoin and maybe the upside potential of what we're seeing happen in the world today. And those that invested in it early are transforming their lives as we see Bitcoin go up.

But they— people need to realize it's still early. See, that's— yeah, like I said, right? The people at $100 thought they were late.

Aren't they happy now? And the people who buy at $100, they're going to be happy too, I truly believe.

Like I said, I just bought yesterday. At $97,000, I'm a believer.

Yeah. I know I bought some just a week ago myself when it was really high as well, because I do have that same level of optimism about what's going on here and its impact and all these other large organizations, governments, whatever, coming in and stockpiling it is going to be an interesting dynamic to play out and it's going to drive the value of it up.

It's a new dynamic for sure.

It's definitely a new dynamic. That and corporations buying it, two of those, those are going to drastically shift it. And I just like you hope that more and more people get into it before they can't afford it or before what they get is a pittance compared to what they could have had. I truly do.

That's the only reason I do these shows. That's the only reason I do anything public about Bitcoin is really, like I said, I'm not doing it.

I'm not giving out a code where I can get a discount. A referral fee. I'm just trying to like educate people about Bitcoin because I think it's that important. And then that—

the thing is, something I also like to say which I haven't said, and we went over this a little bit earlier, you have Bitcoiners, you have Bitcoin, and you have 20,000 shitcoins, cryptocurrencies, right? People that buy cryptocurrencies want to make money. Everybody wants to make money, so don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking that, but that's their whole goal is I want to make money. I can trade Ethereum for Solana or for Cardano, whatever, and I can make all this money. But people who invest in Bitcoin, pretty much all the hardcore Bitcoiners that have existed through time, realize they can make money, but they're going to change the world.

And they think it's as important to change the world as it is to make money.

And Bitcoin is going to change the world. So I, that's why I say it's going to change everything.

So I'm more worried about bringing as many people on the boat with me as I can. I want all the boats to rise. I want that tide to take everybody up, not just the corporations and the companies and the people who got in a long time ago. And so in that thought pattern, we both do agree, but they've got to start spending at least 5 minutes a week investigating this.

Right. Or it's going to be no one's fault but their own. I mean, it is. I mean, because like I said, Bitcoin doesn't care who you are, don't care where you live. It has no rules or guidance. It just does its thing. If you want to participate, jump on in.

Everybody's inviting you.

No one's saying keep out, you know.

Yeah. So I think it's very important at this stage to get education out there about Bitcoin. Deeper understanding by more people is a good thing. It's certainly a good role for podcasts. It's a good role for YouTube or content creators out there to be talking about this. That's why I invited you on is because I think this is a time that people really have to have a better understanding of what's going on here.

And I'm— and I enjoy—

I mean, I do the Bitcoin Boomer Show every week if someone wants to check that out where we talk about Bitcoin.

But, you know, I have—

I never turn down anyone that to talk about Bitcoin, I wouldn't have turned you down anyway, no matter what you wanted to talk about. We've known each other way too long, but I enjoy being on people's podcasts because I want to share the word.

It's a weird thing to say, but it's—

oh gosh, I can't, I can't think, I can't think of this now. Not the—

gosh, I can't—

there, there's a religious group out there that I can't think of their name. And I'm not knocking this religion by any means, but they think that only like 100,000 people can go to heaven.

Okay.

And my friend is a member of this.

And I told him, so you're not going. That's the case. Because I know you. And there you are not even going to rank up with all the people from the history of Christianity. You will never break into the top 100,000 no matter what you do. And he says, but he goes every Wednesday, goes from house to house down the street talking about um, his religion, trying to convert people. And he converts people not because he thinks he's going to go to heaven, because he realizes he's not going to go to heaven, he's not going to be in 100,000 no matter how many people are converted. But he wants everybody to be living everlasting on Earth. To me, I'm trying to get people into Bitcoin not because it's gonna make my Bitcoin higher.

I mean, gosh, someone buys a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, it hardly goes up.

So if you buy $5 a month, it's not gonna make my Bitcoin worth more. I just want you on for the ride when it's over. So it's a lot of similarities between prophesying is what I'm trying to say. You know, I feel like I'm prophesying not because I'm gonna get more money, because it's what I should do to help people out.

Yeah, I think it is a path to get on the trajectory of growing value instead of being in a currency that's about depreciating value. I think that's the real simple way to think about this is that Bitcoin is a path towards, I think, increasing prosperity, where fiat currency is a path toward decreasing prosperity. So which side do you want to be on?

Right. And actually, like we said earlier, I don't care about— I don't care how poor you are.

I mean, I say that and I have money, so— but to me, it seems like no matter how poor you are, you could buy a dollar's worth of Bitcoin a month If you gave up a habit, maybe you give up lottery cards or something. And not everybody does this. I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be that guy who's not in the situation and not understanding, but I truly believe that anyone could come up with it. You could go outside of 7-Eleven and look around on the ground and find a dollar to buy and buy a dollar's worth of Bitcoin because you can buy that small amount.

And I think that people who don't have a lot are the ones that need to really start getting into it with whatever they can afford. Because it's an asset that they can get into. They don't have a bank account, they can't go get in the stock market, they can't take advantage of those opportunities, but they can still take advantage of this opportunity. And I'm not—

hopefully I'm not coming off as real harsh because that's not my goal, that I'm trying—

that's not what point I'm trying to make. I'm trying to make the point that people who have little or no assets can get into this where they can't get into other ways of making money.

They can't participate in what other people with money can participate in, but in this they can.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think that the future looks bright when you equate Bitcoin into our future. So it's definitely a positive thing. Gary, thank you so much for spending so much time with me, trying to educate people, and hopefully we'll get a lot of people watching this that can, that can pick up a lot of tips around what is going on with Bitcoin.

So thank you for inviting me.

And thank you also for taking over on the post of making sure that the Bitcoin Hall of Fame continues. Really started the podcast Hall of Fame. As somebody who started that, that is near and dear to my heart. So I'm glad to see it wasn't something that had a 5-year run and petered out when, because that first year, as I told you earlier in the pre-show, I just picked all the people for the first year. I'd hate to see them have to go through all that.

Or maybe not even get in the Hall of Fame because now they're not known because so much time has gone by.

And then you have just these celebrities that are known big time getting in. Podcasting was another thing that regular folks got the front run.

Right.

Right. So when are you going to start the, the Bitcoin Hall of Fame?

Oh, I didn't know how you do that.

I'm through.

I always said that, I used to always say that I was really good at seeing what was going to come up. Things are going to be hot, like I started Building e-commerce sites in '96 when people told me I was stupid. People wouldn't buy stuff on the internet. And I remember in 2004, I started telling people about podcasting, said, that's stupid. You can listen to your car radio. Why would you listen to a podcast?

And now I'm telling people about Bitcoin and they're going, ah, it's made up money. So this is probably at 70, my last hurrah is just educating people about Bitcoin, which is what my conference is.

It's really just educating people about Bitcoin. So, yeah, but Rob, thank you for taking over the Podcasting Hall of Fame and making sure that keeps going. That's pretty exciting to me. Now, I know there are more people than you involved, but I'm talking to you right now, so I'm just—

sure, sure. Oh yeah, there's definitely a, a growing list of people that are involved in it now. So what's the best path for someone that's watching this that wants to get into Bitcoin and also learn more about what you're doing and how— other resources?

Well, if you want to Follow me.

I'm pretty much just Gary Leland everywhere, so I'm pretty easy to find. But the best path to do is basically what I said is number one, go read the Bitcoin white paper that is explaining what Bitcoin is. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that as he released Bitcoin, and that'll take you 20 minutes to read, if 20 minutes.

It's not that complicated.

Read that and you get an understanding of the idea behind Bitcoin. I was into Bitcoin like 2 years before I ever bothered to read it. So I was like, oh, this is really educational.

Read that and then go to Swan or go to River or go to Unchained and set up to start doing some dollar cost averaging. And by yourself, figure out how much money you can afford per week or per month to do.

Some people that's gonna be $5, some people that's going to be $5,000. $1,000.

But figure out what you can afford to do. And like I said, if you have to quit a habit or peeing money away to do it, quit that and do it.

And put something away every month in Bitcoin. You can do it and not even notice it. And believe me, giving up cigarettes or e-cigarettes or liquor is way better to own Bitcoin than have those, I promise you.

And then between reading the white paper signing up for dollar cost averaging. I would gamble to say within a year you've gone down the rabbit hole and you understand Bitcoin, and you're going to be sending me an email, thanks for being on Rob's show, I now have Bitcoin and I would never have this much wealth if it wasn't for you.

Yeah, my future looks financially bright because of it, right?

Right, right, exactly. Yeah, it changes everything. You start that rabbit hole, it's a deep rabbit hole, and you'll be in Free. All I watch is Bitcoin content now. All I watch. I watch TV, it's on YouTube, and I'm watching Bitcoin content all day because you can never— it's never a never-ending rabbit hole.

Well, and there is a lot of Bitcoin content on YouTube that is very helpful. I know I've been watching them quite a bit more lately, and it's helped me understand more about what's going on than I had paid attention to before. Even though I own Bitcoin, it wasn't like I was paying attention to it for multiple years. And I also bought mine through Swan, just like which you had mentioned. It seems like a really credible company and they do a nice job.

And in all openness, and it tends to be openness, I do—

I am an early investor in Swan, but I'm not in Unchained and I'm not in River. So I was naming the top 3, so I don't want to come back, oh yeah, everybody go to Swan, he owns part of that. As our early advisor, they gave me stock for my participation. So, but I'm just saying it because I think it's a good company. I wouldn't have been involved with them, but I gave you two other ones also.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it is. I mean, my experience with it has been good.

So I had my sister, my sister uses them and she's 75. So I would not have my sister use them if I didn't.

That says a lot actually, because that's exactly some of the people that need to embrace this is ones that are in their 60s and actually 50s and 40s.

My sister called me up the other day in a panic going, all my Bitcoin's missing from my account. There's no Bitcoin in there. And I went to their contact page. What a piece of shit. You can only send them an email. You can't call.

Like, well, Cindy, that's pretty much the way the whole world is now.

She goes, but my Bitcoin is missing. So, you know, I know people there since, uh, who I am.

And so I sent a message and Corey said, Well, we've never lost anyone's Bitcoin. I'm sure it's there. Turns out she changed her email address and forgot and was logging in with her old email address and it was an account that had no Bitcoin in it. So, but she had forgot. So, so they do have customer service. She would've got the help, but she just got it faster because I had to make sure my sister didn't have a heart attack.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I noticed on Swan, if you invested in Bitcoin like 4 or 5 years ago, those investment accounts in Swan are considered now to be legacy accounts or wire-only accounts. I'm not— and then recently I invested new funds into it and it created a new account. Do you happen to know what the difference is between a legacy account and a new account?

I do not.

I do not know.

You don't?

I don't keep up on the day-to-day with that.

Uh, I got it. I was just curious if it was a common practice. Yeah, earlier investment was done differently.

I do know they were using— they don't, they're not, they don't hold Bitcoin. They're—

you're never going to have to worry about someone hacking into Swan or stealing their computers. They use a third party that's a vault company they always use to hold your Bitcoin. So it's being held to keep them out of the loop, so you don't have to worry about them.

So I do know that maybe a year and a half ago, I'm saying they switched vault companies.

So maybe the people who have legacy accounts still have a vault with the old company and the other ones have a vault with the new company because they switched vault companies. So I'm just guessing though, so don't hold me to that.

Well, that's the impression I've gotten in the interface is that there, there was a different kind of storage methodology in the past and that this new one is newer and it seems to be maybe a little bit better.

I don't—

yeah, I think maybe it was an upgrade, or maybe they felt, uh, since they— even, even though they don't hold your Bitcoin, if something happens to all the Bitcoin, they're going to get blamed because you paid them for your Bitcoin, you know what I mean? So I think they keep up with what's going on, and maybe they felt the newer service was more secure. I'm not sure. Like I said, I don't keep up with that yet because I don't keep any Bitcoin on an exchange. I transfer. Yeah.

So I need to, yeah, I need to transfer it from the legacy account over to something else. I'm not exactly sure how to do that.

So, yeah, well, customer service is definitely going to walk you through that. Just send them an email on their sheet. Okay.

But you know, and also a little tip to people, you don't want to be transferring around $15, $20 worth of Bitcoin.

There are fees every time you transfer it because that's how the mining companies make money is transferring Bitcoin.

Bitcoin.

So maybe when it gets to definitely over $100, I try not to transfer Bitcoin until it's $1,000. You want as many— the least amount of transactions that in your wallet as possible. So if I'm buying something for $1,000 and it takes 40 transactions that I made to buy that, it's going to take up more room in the block, it's going to cost more. So yeah, so you want big trans— that's a good way to wait till it gets a good amount and then transfer transfer it over. Don't transfer it every time. It gets to be $25, you know, even $25, you're not probably not going to die if you lose it, right?

Yeah. All right, Gary, well, thank you, and I appreciate everybody that's, that watched this full video to the end. This is part of a series of, uh, shows that I've done called Trust Factor, and it's on, on my YouTube channel at Rob Greenlee. And then it's also an audio podcast that's available in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So if you wanted to you know, follow some of the older episodes that I've had. I've talked about AI in the last episode, and then prior to that, I talked about like aliens and other types of secret societies around trust. And so, so definitely follow the show and thank you so much. And I've got a bunch of other content on my YouTube channel too. So thank you very much, Gary. Thanks for spending so much time with me.

This has been amazing. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

It's a long time.

It's been a long time since we've talked.

Yeah, it has.

So we made it.

All right, we did. All right, bye everybody.