Crypto can change your life, but it won’t happen unless YOU find the solution and YOUR buidl the conviction yourself.
Introduction
What's up crew? Happy 2024! If we've never met before, I'm Gerbz. I've been full-time in crypto since 2013, and my mission is to help you crush it with crypto. To help as many people as possible crush it with crypto this cycle. Especially this cycle. The bull market's on deck, and I call it Boom4. It's the fourth major cycle that we've been through, and this cycle is just getting started.
No, I'm not selling anything. I've always said like investing in crypto is what fills my pockets, but helping people invest in crypto and helping them crush it with crypto is what fills my tank.
I really just want to help people with crypto. And everyone texts me, I get hundreds of texts, and I have for so long - especially during the bull market. And I know that if I just record myself and create a podcast out of what I'm doing, that it could serve a lot more people, and serve them better because I actually have time to think about my answers.
Why Can't I Just "DIY" It?
Yeah, you can do it yourself, but it's a lot easier and more helpful if you have a wing man along the way. Someone who's seen these cycles, experienced the emotional turmoil of going through these crypto cycles.
The thing is you can't follow what other people are doing in crypto, like that just doesn't work. You have to come up with your own ideas. You have to look out into the world and see what problems exist, then go into crypto and find crypto projects that are working to solve those problems.
Yeah, everyone's just trying to get rich in crypto, but the way to do it isn't by following other people. You need to build conviction within your own ideas. The way to succeed at this is to come up with an idea, follow that rabbit hole of an idea all the way to the bottom, and then invest in that idea for yourself.
And when it succeeds, it's a completely different feeling than following someone else. Like if it goes up or if it goes down, you won't know what to do if you just follow what someone else is doing. But if this is your idea and you believe in it, you'll know exactly what to do when the time comes.
This is not going to be easy. Anything worth doing is not going to be easy.
When I listened to podcasts, the way that I listened to them, I don't take notes on what the people are saying. I always end up pausing the podcast when it inspires an amazing idea within myself. Like, I listen to podcasts to have ideas, to create ideas. My favorite podcasts create ideas.
And so what I'm hoping for with this podcast is that it helps you create your own ideas. Like, don't write down any cryptos that I mention or investment strategies that I even talk about. Listen to them - and I'm sure you're going to have a great fucking idea - that's when you pause, write down your ideas and invest in yourself.
So let's get started. Let's get the ideas flowing.
What is Gerbz Hopeful For In Crypto?
So every month here in Boulder, we host the Boulder Blockchain Meetup. 20, 30 of us who are deep in crypto get together, and we just talk crypto. We usually like, the first couple hours, we talk about what's going on in the markets. And usually everyone complains about like government regulation and stuff. And then we get into the tech and we talk tech and we go really deep into tech. And then after that, we roll to a brewery and we keep talking shop.
I met a new person at the last meetup, his name is Connor. He's a wicked smart dude. And during our conversation, he asked me - he wanted to know what I hope for crypto.
The weird part, I, you know, I paused. And I was trying to understand even, like, what that question really meant for a second. What am I hopeful for in crypto?
And the reality is, I didn't really feel hopeful for anything. Being "hopeful" felt a little strange. Like, I'm not hopeful for crypto. I understand why that's the question - he's trying to create the future of the crypto economy, the crypto universe, the cryptoverse. But, what I was thinking about more was how crypto has already succeeded in a lot of the ways that I was looking for - and I felt like we don't really take enough time to appreciate that.
It's not that we shouldn't be hopeful, it's just that we need to take some time to appreciate what we have.
I feel like being hopeful for something is just very future-looking. It's just like, all you're thinking about is what's coming next versus being appreciative of what we have.
And I feel like that energy is what causes all the FOMO to occur, and all the mania, and all the super extreme booms and busts that we feel. It's because everyone's trying to predict the future and only focused on the future...versus understanding and being appreciative of the blockchains and the projects and the things that we have.
Like, we built hard money. We built a world computer that you can tokenize anything, and it's fully distributed and permissionless and trustless. These are the things that, I mean, we talk about them, but do we take the time to really appreciate them?
Gerbz Takes Time to Reflect
So over the holiday break, I just took some time to reflect on what's really worked for me in crypto. Kind of what I'm trying to achieve with this podcast, and how can I really help people? How can I, if my goal for the podcast is to help people crush it with crypto, well, how can I help you guys actually fucking crush it?
Yeah, I've been doing this episode, I think the last episode was episode 60, and I feel like the advice I've been giving - I'm proud of the advice that I'm giving, but I'm not really hitting on what my goal is for the podcast. And I think it's more of a reflection of the questions that have been asked of me.
You know, everyone wants to know like, what meme coins should I buy? Or, what breakdown of Bitcoin and ETH, should I hold in my portfolio? And I just feel like those are the wrong questions, right?
The right questions to be asking are more like, what are the problems in the world that blockchains can help solve? And you know, how big are these problems? Are they investible problems? How big is the investment opportunity within these problems? And then once you've identified these problems that exist outside in the world, then you look into crypto for projects that are working to solve those, problems, right?
And if you can find those, then you go deep and you obsess over those projects. You go down the rabbit hole. You join their Discords, you ask a lot of questions, you read their white papers, and you build that conviction that you're going to need in order to survive the cycle that's coming. Because the cycle that's coming is about to be...it's going to be absolutely crazy.
There's so, so, so much noise in crypto. And yeah, I think in like the first episode of the whole podcast, maybe the second, it's like, breaking the signal from the noise in crypto, right? And that's really important to do. And I think the way to achieve that is by just following your own ideas instead of following other people's ideas, right?
I mean, we talked about this, you can't just copy trade what people are doing. You need to go down these rabbit holes and build that conviction for yourself. And I think that's the secret to avoiding the noise, right? Like you're going to find, you're going to stumble on the tons of things you're going to, you can make checklists forever of projects to explore and white papers to read.
I have, I literally have a folder on my computer, of PDFs from 2017 of ICO's that I was supposed to read their white paper and invest in. Like, that, part's easy. Finding information is easy. What's hard is finding the right problems that need solving and trying to figure out what projects within crypto solve those problems. And I think going deep, going really deep, into a couple of projects that you think are on the right track...you know, they might not perfectly have solved the problem yet, but if they seem like they're on the right track to solving that problem, those are the ones that go deep on. Those are the ones to pay attention to. And the deeper you go, the further the noise gets from you.
Problems and Solutions
The hard part is really finding someone who has an elegant solution to the problem that you found. You know, it's actually very easy to like, create incredibly complicated solutions to problems. I think Einstein like, knows everything there is to ever know about math, and he can write things down about physics and relativity that you would never even be able to understand. But then I think when we look back at the geniuses that we remember, rather, are the ones that were able to explain it to everyday people in a way that made sense.
So if you find yourself kind of trying to figure out how this thing works, and it's just going over your head...I mean, you're a smart person! You're listening to a crypto podcast. You're investing in crypto. You understand in some way, shape, or form what's going on here. If you can't understand what this project is trying to do and the solution that they've come up with to solving it...if you can't navigate it yourself, there's no fucking way anyone else can!
And so once, you've gone down these rabbit holes and you actually fundamentally understand these elegant solutions to the problem being solved, you'll understand it so deeply, that's what creates the conviction within you to hold on when the thing is tanking 25% in one day, like, a month from now.
You're going to buy more in that moment, you're not going to panic. You're going to be, you're going to be stoked that it's down 25%. And that's the actual way to succeed in crypto is that, again, everyone else on the internet is going to be panicking and freaking out and selling. Or, FOMOing all over the place.
You're going to know what to do because you're stoked about this project. You're stoked about the future of it, and you're going to want more of it in that moment. And that's what separates the good traders from the bad ones.
Don't Search In Reverse
Another way that I see people doing this is, you know, they sign up for Coinbase and they like, look through the list of all the crypto's on the list. And it's usually sorted by like market cap, so they see Bitcoin, ETH, Tether, XRP. They want to invest in Ripple, and they don't know yet what problems those projects are trying to solve.
They're kind of, they're doing in reverse. They're like, "Oh, I should invest in Bitcoin because it's first on the list." And then they go Google, like what problem is Bitcoin solving? And then they're like, oh, Bitcoin is trying to be money. Is that a good problem? I don't know. I mean, I kind of feel like I have money, right?
So maybe let's go to the next one. Let's go to Ethereum. Oh, it's trying to be a world computer. I mean, I have a computer, and it's pretty fast though. Do I really need that? I don't know. Let's go to the next one.
XRP. Oh, it's a new...oh, blockchains for banks? Oh, that sounds like a good idea. Yeah, banks need to get on blockchain! Maybe, I should do that.
That's just the wrong, that's the wrong approach. That's the reverse way. And that's why people end up investing in Ripple, right? Because this is literally how they're doing it. Instead, you need to find a problem that you have.
Like, do you feel safe and secure with the money that's in your bank account? Like, when you transfer it to E-Trade and start buying stocks or like, investing in index funds, does that feel good? Do you feel like you're making a good decision, a good choice? Do you feel safe with your money sitting in these banks?
I know that I don't. The idea of investing in real estate or in bonds or in these things that I don't understand, it just feels like that's just what society has told me to do. So I just kind of follow that, instead of coming up for myself. Finding those problems that I actually have, like store of value. That's a real problem that I have. Bitcoin is by far the best solution that I've found for that, right? So it's find the problem first, and then go to Coinbase and look at the list, try to find the crypto that solves the problem.
Shifting Narratives
The narratives around each coin, they're going to keep changing. Right? Like Bitcoin started, the narrative was all about payments. Satoshi talked about, you know, electronic digital cash. So 15 years ago, the whole point of Bitcoin was digital cash on the internet, and e-commerce. We were talking about e-commerce, and how, websites are going to have Bitcoin addresses on them, and that's the way that you're going to use Bitcoin.
And today we've shifted so far from that, no one talks about that because Bitcoin's a bit slow, a bit expensive, especially if everyone's trying to use it at the same time. It's okay that it's changed. But just know that even the problem that you've found, it's these narratives, they shift. They shift a lot over time. And, is Bitcoin the solution for digital cash? Probably, but we found new ways for that to happen, right? We're going to build layers on top of Bitcoin for digital cash.
But what's really sticking at the base layer is this store of value narrative. Everyone needs a place to store their hard earned value that they created in the world, and we don't want to put it in Wall Street. We don't want to buy homes and then be dealing with real estate issues that you don't understand. Buying Bitcoin and having the liquidity and the trustlessness and permissionlessness of being able to just invest your money in Bitcoin, have full control and custody of it...that is an epic, epic solution to the store of value problem. And those are the kinds of problems that we're trying to find.
And the funny thing about, you know, back when Bitcoin first started and when I started investing in it in 2013, is that it felt very similar to the way it does right now. You know everyone, there was a narrative that existed, everyone was like super stoked about this narrative. There were tons of startups popping up that were like digital cash wallets for Bitcoin, and all the brands were hopping in. Microsoft was accepting Bitcoin as payment. Richard Branson was accepting Bitcoin for flights on his space shuttle that was going to go into, orbit. And there were all, everyone was super stoked on this narrative that was happening within Bitcoin.
And so, you know, the same exact things are happening now, right? Everyone's looking at like, DeFi is a great example. Everyone knows like, DeFi as a thing. It's important for us to not have to trust Wall Street not only with holding our money, but how to invest our money - and all the rules and regulations around what you're allowed to invest in and what you're not allowed to and how you're allowed to.
So, basically what I'm saying is that these narratives, they really do shift over time. And if you find one that is really fundamental, it'll exist forever. Even at the foundation level.
Patience Is Critical
What's interesting is that these problems, even though we've been in crypto for 15 years, 10 years, whatever, for over a decade now...these problems do not solve themselves quickly. Like, we have these problems still, right?
Still, the only way to pay for something on the internet before Bitcoin was credit cards. After Bitcoin, it's credit cards and Bitcoin, right? But what percentage of sites actually allow you to check out with Bitcoin?
It's probably cause we've been down that rabbit hole, we've tried. I mean, the first version, the first iteration of BitLift, was literally an e-commerce-like hub for selling things for crypto. And the reality was, there just isn't enough people who have crypto like, on their phones, and ready to spend. And what's really stuck is the store of value narrative instead of the payments narrative. And that's okay that these things kind of shift over time.
And I do see a future where everyone is paying online with crypto, like, that is going to happen. We are not going to be punching in 16 digits and our home mailing address and the name of our dog and the year we were born and our social security number into every website on the internet. We're not going to be doing that forever. It's fucking amazing that how long we've been doing that for. It's not going to happen forever. This is why someone is going to build an elegant solution to that problem. This is my point. We haven't found the elegant solution to it yet. So nothing has stuck.
It's going to happen. It's going to happen fast. The iPod was a thousand songs in your pocket. Before that, like, MP3 players existed! MP3s existed. But no one had created an elegant solution. And the second one appears, everyone will have it.
It'll take a year. Within one year. I don't know when the year is going to be, it could be 20 years from now, it could be tomorrow. Someone's going to solve online payments, and everyone's going to start using it. So that's why you got to keep an eye out for these elegant solutions, and don't be sort of suaded by the super technical stuff. That these guys seem really smart, and they seem like they know what they're doing. Maybe they do, maybe they have a technically better solution. But if it's not elegant enough for everyone to use, it's not going to succeed.
Identifying Solutions and What to Do Next
When I identified Bitcoin as the solution to the problem that I was trying to find, I was just like...I consumed myself with Bitcoin stuff, right? And over that time, you know, like Litecoin existed, Dogecoin existed, Monero existed.
These would have been, this is like the FOMO stuff, right? There were all these things popping up that everyone was saying, oh, this is going to replace Bitcoin. This is Monero, is Bitcoin plus privacy, like, duh, don't we want privacy? And so, what I found is that these other projects...they just, they added. They were Bitcoin with a feature on top of it, right?
And whenever you see something like that, that means that Bitcoin is the investment opportunity, not the fork of it with a feature improvement. There was a lot of talk back in the day of, if any of these forks ever do stumble on a feature that becomes really, really vital to cryptocurrencies, then Bitcoin will adopt that feature. And what's funny is that actually never happened.
Like, Bitcoin is sort of like it's solidifying in such a way that like it's never...I don't think Bitcoin will ever adopt a new feature, to be totally honest at this point. But back then, that was the narrative that was going on.
And, I played with Dogecoin. I liked the idea. There was like, there was Doge bots on Reddit. And like, every time you upvoted something on Reddit, you could fling them some Doge automatically. There was a bot that would do it. And it was a really fun, cool way to use Dogecoin that you couldn't use Bitcoin for at the time.
But was that the investment opportunity? Tipping people for upvotes on Reddit? Was that the life-changing investment opportunity of a lifetime? It was quite obvious that it wasn't. It was fun. It was a cool feature, but it wasn't the thing. And so once you find that thing and you go really deep, you start to really fundamentally understand the problem that it's solving, and why it's needed. And like I said, that noise just sort of starts to dissipate.
Conviction Helps You Hodl Through Hard Times
When I first identified the Bitcoin solved this problem that I was seeking, I did the same thing as everyone else, right? I just, I invested as much money as I could into it, right? And that was at $250 bucks, it was November of 2013. I bought 10 Bitcoin at 250 bucks, so that's like $2,500 bucks. So that was like my life savings at the time, right?
I rode it from 250 bucks to a thousand dollars and I sold all 10 Bitcoin. And I'm not going to lie, like, that energy - that was the best investment I'd ever made in my life at the time. That experience is what really sucked me into like, "Okay, this is the thing." It really, it confirmed that this was the thing I was looking for. At least it seemed like it confirmed it in my mind, right?
And then I spent the next two years in the fucking shitter. Bitcoin tanked from a thousand to under $250, maybe - I forget the exact bottom. I think $150? It was a full year straight down, a full year sideways. It was really, really hard to hold onto that conviction I'd had. And if that conviction I had was about my trading, how I'm like a genius trader, I probably would have bailed.
But the conviction that I built, it was more about the fact that I'd found a solution to this problem of online payments. And I'd used it. I'd used it to pay for hundreds of things, and that's what really stuck. That's what kept me around through the bear market.
If there's any theme from this episode, it's really about building that conviction and how to properly build that conviction. And it's just not by following people, it's by using these things.
The Emotional Highs and Lows of a Cycle
It's really an emotional roller coaster when you're going through these crypto cycles. You know, even back then, we didn't know that there were cycles. So, picture being in the first cycle, you see it fricking blow off top within one week. Going up, you know, 4-5x in one week, and then dumping. That was really hard. That was a really hard thing to go through, especially not knowing that it's going to happen again. Like, that was it. Maybe that was it.
But, you know, because I had that conviction around payments and around the actual feature set that Bitcoin had, I was able to hang in there and I was able to - I mean, not only was I able to hang in there, I literally founded and started a new business during that time with the specific goal of acquiring as much Bitcoin as possible, right? I already mentioned, I invested my life savings in Bitcoin. I couldn't invest any more, I didn't have any more money to invest. And the only way I could come up with to get more Bitcoin was to start a business that accepted Bitcoin as payment.
And so that's what I did. I didn't even care what industry it was in. I just started accepting, started selling stuff and accepting Bitcoin as payment. Building my stack that way. There wasn't a lot of people spending Bitcoin, so I started also accepting dollars, which, you know, I didn't really like. I felt like a bit of a sellout by even taking payments in dollars because I was so deep into crypto at that time. But I did, I took the dollars.
And then what happened as the business started becoming successful, it was profitable. I had a little bit more cash at the end of every month than I needed. I took every extra dollar that I had every month and I smashed bought more Bitcoin at the end of the month. I'd do my books, I'd see, oh, I've got an extra thousand dollars this month. I didn't even care about trading or what price Bitcoin was out of what was happening in the market. I just smashed bought more.
I'd already built such a conviction and I was using it. And in such a way that like, I knew this was going to happen again. We didn't have the pattern that we have now, I just, I knew it was going to happen. Now, I actually believe in the pattern. I think the pattern is real too.
We talk about the cycles, we talk about the halving, we talk about stock-to-flow, but none of that stuff existed then. And maybe even now that I think of it, it's like, part of why I believe in that pattern and I believe in stock-to-flow is because I also knew this was going to happen before I knew about stock to flow.
And again, we're just stacking and piling this conviction on top of itself. Like, I know Bitcoin is going to be around for a long time. It's a done deal. It's going to also eventually become like, the store of value layer for all of, for everything on earth, unless something more elegant comes around. I just don't see that right now.
Our Own Personal Narratives Can Change, Too
So back in 2013 when I bought, but then really was 2014-15 which was the really bad bear market. My first bear market that I'd ever experienced in crypto. It was also while I was stacking the most crypto. During that time, the, sort of the problem I had and the problem I identified was all around payments, right? It was around e-commerce. And I didn't have a store of value problem yet, because I didn't have any value to store. And so what I find interesting is the Bitcoin narrative has shifted to more of solving a store of value problem and solving a payments problem. And the problem that I've identified with Bitcoin has also shifted to more of a store of value problem over that time. Maybe it's because all the early Bitcoiners like, got rich and now they have a store of value problem that's more important than the payments problem. Like, that's basically what happened.
But, we've also found that storing our value in Bitcoin has been a really, really good decision. There's plenty of charts out there you can find that show if you've just hold your money in dollars, like it buys you a lot less today than if you've held your money in Bitcoin.
Even if you bought Bitcoin at the top of the last three booms, if you bought Bitcoin at the highest top of each of those three booms, you still would be better off than if you held your money in dollars. That's really interesting, right?
Everyone thinks they're buying at the worst time. They're buying at the top. They all disappeared because they think they've made this terrible, horrible decision. I mean, they have made a bad decision that week. They should have waited and not like succumbed to the FOMO. But it still didn't matter. It's still been probably the best investment opportunity they've ever had if they were able to hold on.
And this goes back to that foundation again. If you don't have that conviction, you're not going to be able to hold on when Bitcoin takes 50% over a two year period. You're going to move on. So, you got to build that conviction.
FUD and Paranoia
What I find really interesting is that the FUD, it never dies. It never goes away. I mean, maybe it does for a little while during the boom. Like, the beginnings of the boom markets when there's not a lot of people around, the FUD is sort of minimal, right? As the bull market starts to take form and as people start to see their thousand dollar investment become a $5,000 investment - as people's $5,000 becomes $50k, people who've never had $50k in the bank before. I mean, you can understand how stressful that is.
You bought some, like, "dog coin" probably because someone on TikTok told you about it. And maybe it's working, right? Like you don't even know why, you don't even know what the point of this thing is. You've now got this big stack of cash, it creates a lot of paranoia.
Paranoia I think is what fuels the FUD. And when we say FUD we're talking fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And that fear it's really powerful, man. Fear is a lot more powerful than conviction. Conviction is just sort of like, deep within you. But like, fear lives on the edge and it's around every corner, you know? Like everywhere you look, like, something is going to destroy your crypto portfolio. And it's really fucking scary.
And like, I totally understand that. And so what tools do we have at our disposal in order to fight the FUD? And the only tool there is is conviction.
That's the only thing I know. Because, even if you ask everyone you know who's in crypto, what are they doing, "Should I sell or should I buy more? What should I do?" They're in the exact same place as you are. They don't know what to do. The only people that know what to do are people who have a) been through it before or b) they just believe in the thing so strongly and they know what's happening along the way. They've seen this pattern happen and they know that, you know, it's okay. Like, people you need to just, everyone needs to calm down a little bit. Not be so fearful.
If you need to, if your portfolio is too heavy in "dog coin" - like, sell some fucking "dog coin" - like, that's what you do, that's how you get rid of the FUD and the fear. Put it in Bitcoin where it's safe and you kind of already know maybe that you've got conviction. And maybe, yeah, trade it into something that you've got a little conviction in, and that will help with the fear and the FOMO and the FUD and all that chaos that goes on during the cycle.
The Fear and Greed Index
There's something called the fear and greed index. I'm not very certain how it's measured, but it's basically like a sentiment analysis. I'm pretty sure the fear and greed index like basically looks at Twitter and it looks at CoinMarketCap and it looks at all the places that people talk about crypto, and it analyzes the language that they're using in their tweets, right?
If they're talking about like, things that sound scary, or if they're talking about like, regulation, that means the fear is going up, right? And if they're talking about "to the moon" or "buying more!" or "buy the dip!" - like, that's the greed. That's the green portion. Or they're talking about like, if the word "Lambo" shows up more than, the word, like "broke" - then they know the greed index is going up, right?
So there is ways to actually analyze this, and it's fun and interesting to map the fear and greed index to the price of Bitcoin, for example.
Applying Our Knowledge to Today's Markets
The hard part for me now is how do I take what I've learned through my experience, investing in crypto, and how do we apply it to investing in crypto today? Because obviously the market is very, it seems very different, than it does 10 years ago.
I'm not sure that it really is that different. I mean, more people know about crypto now. There's more investors. There's also more developers. There's more, like, professionals. There's more, like, you see Bitcoin on CNBC now. Like, things have definitely changed since they did then, but how can we take what we've learned from then and apply it to today?
And, I think it's really just about identifying new problems that we have today. I don't feel like in 2013 - we had the internet, but did we really have as much noise and uncertainty as we have today. Did we really have as much distrust in sort of everything around us that I know I'm feeling today?
I have a feeling most of you are feeling this sense of distrust that I'm feeling. You know what, like, we can't trust every layer of the stack, right? Like, I can't trust people that I meet. I can't trust the businesses I interact with. I can't trust the government, obviously. So what can I trust and how can we solve this trust problem?
And I think what Bitcoin obviously did really well, is it solved the trust problem with money. Like, most people who haven't gone down the "what is money" rabbit hole - first of all, you really need to - but second of all, once you understand that money is just this piece of paper that the government prints on a whim that is diluting the value that you have stored in your bank account, you start to realize really quickly that money is the worst store of value ever created and you got to put your money somewhere else. And so let's put it into something that you can trust. And that's what Bitcoin solves for, it solved trust in money.
And so what I'm looking for today and what I'm thinking about as far as what to invest in now is - what other areas have this trust problem? And, who's working on these issues around trust? Who's bringing blockchains to the solution of solving trust issues using encryption and using blockchains, right?
So, let me give you a simple example. The example around encryption would be, if I post, if I put a post out on the internet, how do you know that it came from me? Like, you don't really know, especially if it was like screenshotted on one app and then shared on another app. You don't know. Maybe my Twitter was hacked or my Facebook was hacked. I haven't, I don't post on Facebook, but my Instagram maybe was hacked. How do you know that it actually came from me?
I mean, you know, hopefully that, you know I protect my password and that no one logged in as me. But how do you genuinely know that the information I'm putting out in the world came from me?
And, a simple way to do that would be if I signed that message with my private key, the private key that, maybe like my Gerbz.eth private key... if I put out a message that signed with that key, you can immediately verify it. In fact, and not you actually. Like, so if there was a social network built on encryption, it could just have a check mark next to every post as to whether this post was actually signed with the private key of the person that posted it.
And, this isn't even a blockchain. This is like, simple encryption technology that we've had for a long time. But, why aren't we really using that properly yet to bring trust to the information that's being put out in the world?
Like, if you see a headline that's screenshotted from the New York Times, we see screenshots on Instagram every day, right? What if it's a New York Times article that screenshotted on Instagram? How do you know that actually came from the New York Times? Like, you gotta go to the New York Times and try to find it? And just to verify that it's there?
What if there was better ways to verify and to create trust within the information that we disseminate everywhere? That's one simple example, maybe something that I'd be looking for, a project that's working on solving trust in news and information. That could be a great investment opportunity right now.
Finding Investment Opportunities
Sort of the worst place to look for the problems that exist in the world is on crypto Twitter or hanging out in the cryptosphere, looking for a problem. Because everyone in there is just hucking their solution to a problem that_ they've_ identified.
And, who knows? Maybe, they're just like, spending VC money to try to make their VCs rich. You can't trust what they're saying. Again, it's like this problem once again of not being able to trust what's out there.
The best place to look for a solution to a problem is just find a problem that exists within your day-to-day life. Like, a problem that's not at your desk. It's not on your phone. It's a problem that you have in the real world. Maybe it's a problem with paying your bills or maybe it's a problem with trying to invest. And maybe every time you try to invest, like how do you figure out what to invest in? You have to transfer money to some account with some bank. How do you, why do you trust them? How did you even choose that? Did you read some bullshit blog post that talked about the 10 best banks to invest with?
This is a simple problem that we don't have a solution for. Everyone is distrustful of everything. Again, so finding a problem outside of crypto first. That's the starting point for then being able to solve one using crypto.
if you read about a problem, and then you found a solution, that's very different than having a problem. Like, if you have a problem, a need if there's something messed up in your life, then you go and find the solution to it. And you try that solution and it solves your problem? That's conviction. That's how you build it. I mean, Invest in that.
Chasing the Future
I think what's interesting in the chapter we're in and the cycle that we're in right now in crypto is that everyone is so focused on what's coming next. What's the next altcoin? What's the next L1 that's going to be the new base layer for DeFi? Or, which L2 is going to be the next, the fastest, and best way to experience Ethereum?
Everyone's chasing the next thing because, and I get it, they want to get, they want to get in early, right? Everyone wants to be early to the new thing. And I mean, I do understand that. But it's not giving enough credit to the technologies that we have which haven't really had enough time yet to see them play out.
Like, Bitcoin, for example. It was designed to solve payments. It's still hasn't solved payments. It ended up solving store of value before it solved payments. That doesn't mean it's not going to solve payments. It doesn't mean that there isn't maybe a new project built on Bitcoin that's going to solve payments. Like, I really still think that solving the payments problem, the online payments problem - now that we've solved the store of value problem, that's what we're going to want to use to solve the payments problem.
And we're not going to want to use some new thing invented today to solve the payments problem. Let's build on what we have. We have a hard money. We have a store of value. Now let's use it to solve payments. So, that's a good place maybe to find solutions to the problem of online payments is who's solving payments using Bitcoin.
And I mean, the Lightning network has tried to do that. The Lightning network has been for a long time the only real solution, the only attempt, at solving payments on Bitcoin. The problem with the Lightning network is it's just not elegant. No one I talked to can even really explain the Lightning network to me. Not only can they not explain it, they just don't use it. Like, they flat out don't use it. And that's just a really good sign to me that it's just, it's not the elegant solution that we're looking for. So I'm still on the hunt for something elegant for solving payments, probably on Bitcoin.
Store of Value and Wall Street
Yeah, store of value...I actually didn't hear about store of value very much in the early days of Bitcoin. I'm sure there was people talking about it, but it definitely wasn't like the primary narrative. It was about this fast digital money that you could flip it around, and fees were nothing. And, you know, blocks were still 10 minutes a block, but you could get zero confirmations, obviously pretty instantly.
And so store of value just wasn't really talked about that much. It was a problem though. Maybe it was a problem for for other people, it wasn't a problem for me. So maybe I didn't see it and understand it well enough at the time.
But what's interesting is Wall Street has had a store of value problem for a long time. Wall Street's always looking for a place to store their money.
Store of value is a real problem for people who have real money. And, you know, the reason people diversify, you hear about like diversified portfolios with big money. And that's because it's fucking scary to have a lot of money. That's what the store of value problem means is that storing value is really scary.
You have to be able to trust all these things. The more you diversify, you're sort of diversifying your trust, right? Like, you know, you can't trust any of the things you're putting your money into, so you need to spread it out and do a hundred different things in order to trust the basket.
And that's why people are so diversified. And Wall Street's really waking up to the fact that Bitcoin is truth. If it's on the blockchain, it's real. And there never has been, you know, Bitcoin has never had a hack or a rug. I don't know, no one sees Satoshi coming back anytime soon.
And this Bitcoin ETF is really, really, really interesting. The Bitcoin ETF, I think I'm probably putting this episode out on Tuesday, the Bitcoin ETF, as far as I know, it might be announced on Monday. So you may have finally heard that the Bitcoin ETF is approved yesterday. If, you hear that I'm not a prophet, I've just been following crypto Twitter. That's what the regulators and the Wall Street people are saying is that this is probably coming.
And, what else is interesting about this ETF is that, you know, Wall Street has sort of regulated themselves into a corner. Like, for 10 years they've wanted to invest in Bitcoin and they couldn't. They couldn't because they, like, for some reason they weren't legally allowed to have wallets. I don't even really understand why the investment banks and the hedge funds and all these guys, why they couldn't just buy Bitcoin and hold onto it. Like, it doesn't really make sense to me.
But what does make sense to me is that they finally found a way to solve that problem, which is build more layers of distrust between Bitcoin and themselves in order for them to invest in it. So, if that's what they have to do, fine. I can tell you right now, I'm not buying the Bitcoin ETF. I don't know anyone in crypto who would ever touch the Bitcoin ETF. But if these big banks need the Bitcoin ETF in order to buy Bitcoin, I'm all for it, man. Because there's not a lot of Bitcoin to go around. If they want to buy up a ton of Bitcoin within some sort of trust that they've set up, fine. Let them do it. It's only going to send the price up.
Blockchains and the Government
Satoshi says in the very first paragraph of the white paper that Bitcoin solves the problem of all these middlemen, and the distrust we have in the banking system. He was solving the trust problem only with money, but what he may have not foreseen is that we're going to keep continuing to have so much distrust in lots of systems.
In lots of sectors of the economy, so to speak, we're going to continue to have lots of distrust. And what the blockchain is, it's a trust machine. It's a way to trust any of the information within it. It's a way for thousands of nodes on a network to verify that the information within it is accurate and correct, and then lock it in within a block, and then all agree and move forward.
And so, this trust system, I'm looking forward to seeing it applied to more than just money. I think that's a great investment thesis, a great investment opportunity, now going out and finding things that bring trust to other sectors that need it most. That's where I'm going to be focused.
The ultimate use case, I think for a blockchain, might be something like finding trust within our government, right? What if we all paid taxes in crypto to an address held by the government and then you could watch, and maybe you could build visualizations around this - if all of our taxes went to a single address, and from that address, you could watch the money be, by the government, invested in the things that they told us they were investing in. We could actually trust and believe them.
And then when they send, you know, $60 billion off of some address that isn't identified, everyone would see it instantly and we would know. And it would break that trust, and they would be forced to do what they say and say what they do. This is a beautiful example of applying blockchain to the real world.
Now, do I see the US government adopting a trust system? They should. And until they do, I don't fucking trust them.
Right now when the government says they're going to do something, we just, we have to believe them. When they say they've done something with our money, invested in something with our money, we just kind of have to believe that they did that. And even if we weren't following the blockchain closely - what could happen, we could still follow what they say, but if they were using a blockchain, we could verify that what they're saying is true.
And so it's like an old saying in Bitcoin, it's like trust but verify. So you can start, we can begin to build trust in society once again if we know that the systems we're using underneath it are verifiable. And, you don't have to understand how to use blockchain, let some blockchain professional be the one that verifies. And then, as long as we know that we have systems in place for verifying what people are saying, then you can trust, but verify.
The Potential of Tokenization
There's the public markets and there's the private markets as far as like investing in companies go. And, I think another amazing use case is - we've been talking about real world assets, or RWAs, in crypto for a little while, but I think the better term is really just tokenization. Like, the ability to tokenize assets. is a really, really, big deal.
It's a way to bring things that are not money that are not crypto into blockchains, right? So if you tokenize something like, for example, like company equity or stocks - like I always joke about if someone owns a hundred shares of Apple, like where are they? Like, show me your shares. What are they going to do? They're going to log into some bank account and show that they have them.
And, let's be real. Like, there's not like a folder somewhere with your name on it that holds a hundred shares at Apple. That just, who knows how it fucking works at this point? I don't think anyone does. But if we tokenized shares of Apple, put them on the blockchain, we would see exactly - everyone will be able to see exactly where they are. You'd be able to self custody, your shares if you want.
Maybe you trust someone to self custody for you better than you trust yourself with managing private keys. Like, I think you should manage your private keys, but if you want to trust some private key management system to do that for you, sure, go for it. Like Coinbase, for example. I would try that, even I'd trust Coinbase with some shares of my Apple stock.
Coinbase has actually recently announced that they have, they're going to start offering tokenized securities on Coinbase. You're going to be able to trade tokenized securities. And what that means is these are shares in companies or shares in securities that - don't necessarily have to be a company even to be a share, but - shares in opportunities. They're going to be tokenized, put on blockchains, and then easily verifiable. How many there are, whether they've been diluted, whether they've printed more tokens or not, can they print more tokens or not? You'll be able to custody them. I'll be able to send you my shares. Right now, like if you got a hundred shares of Apple and I want to buy them from you, there's just no way to even do it. It'll unlock tons of new use cases that we've never even imagined before.
Tokenization is a big deal. I'm definitely looking at projects that are tokenizing assets. Tokenizing, we call them real-world assets, but just the tokenization of everything is a big, big deal. Obviously that was kind of invented through Ethereum. Ethereum is like a base layer for building applications on top of. All of the first applications were just tokens. The next phase of applications where like dApps and DeFi things that usually also have a token, but this idea of tokenizing things is a big deal.
It seems very, it seems silly to tell you that investing in tokenization is like, an investment opportunity. It seems so generic, right? Like, thanks, Gerbz. Invest in tokenization. Great. How do I do that? Well, go find projects that are saying - that's what they're trying to do, right?
And then see, are there, who are the first companies to test out their thing, right? Is it big banks, or is it like another crypto project, or is it some bro on Instagram? Like who, and then who would you trust down that rabbit hole and then go a little further.
This is literally the process I'm going through right now is finding projects that are building on real-world asset tokenization, and we're going down some rabbit holes. I've shared some in the past, you can find them in past episodes. I'm sure I'm going to come back with new investment opportunities too in the future.
How Much Should I Focus On New Opportunities?
And that's not to say that finding new investment opportunities is even really my focus. Like even still today, My portfolio is 60% Bitcoin, 30% ETH, 10% I'm looking for other investment opportunities, right? And I hope that 10% becomes 30% or 60% of my portfolio, but maybe we shouldn't be giving that 10% as much of our energy.
Bitcoin has the potential to 10X here. Ethereum has the potential to a 100X here. The market caps of all the entire crypto market cap of every crypto coin put together is less than how much Apple is worth. One company in the public markets.
So, the opportunity is not necessarily in finding the tiny thing right now. If we can make crypto as a whole bigger that's big. That's why I'm still spending a lot of time learning about Bitcoin, learning about Ethereum. I mean, this is the bulk of my portfolio.
And I always, I do find it happens to me all the time - I'm starting to focus on all these little altcoins that I'm trying, that I'm investing in, or that I'm like, going down rabbit holes on. And I find a lot of times I put too much energy into that. And they go up 50% in one day and I'm like, oh man, insane. I look at my portfolio and it's up like 1%. So, I know it's exciting when that happens, but really think about where you're putting your energy in and how you can best spend it.
But I Want A Lambo Now!
You know, investing in crypto isn't a get rich quick opportunity. It seems like it is because you read the news and you see "Safemoon is up a thousand percent!" Like, I don't even know what Safemoon is. I never even looked into it. I heard about it all over the place. Because of the way I was hearing about it, I knew to just ignore it.
That's my filter, right? It's like, so, I know that the problem a lot of people are trying to solve in crypto is...they're trying to get rich. And I mean, that is a, when I say go out into the real world and find a real problem, being poor for yourself as a fucking problem, I get it. No one wants to be poor. Paying your bills is important. Everyone's got to solve that for themselves. The problem is when you try to do it quickly.
You can't do it quickly. In fact, the faster you try to do it, the less you're going to succeed at it. Getting rich is not a get rich quick game, it's a game of patience. It's a longterm game. The fact that the crypto cycle is only four years is actually incredible because that's like the shortest business cycle of all cycles. You only have four years that you have to worry about the cycle going through its flow.
So, really just be patient. Build that conviction slowly over time. If what that means is, you know, all the only thing you understand right now is Bitcoin, that means with every spare dollar you have just buying a little Bitcoin.
That's what it means. This isn't complicated. Just the, way that I literally succeeded at investing in crypto was just by buying a little bit more Bitcoin every month and filtering out the noise as best that I could. I did that for years and years. And I really think that does still apply today. Maybe the new thing that you discover or the problem you're trying to solve, maybe you find a new project that's solving that problem. But don't find 50 projects that solve your problems. Find one or two. Really build that conviction. Build trust within the community, within the people creating that project, within what they're saying and what they're actually doing, are they following through with what they say? And invest in it, and go deep on it. That's how I think you can succeed investing in crypto.
Conclusion
That's all I got for you today. Hopefully I stimulated a couple ideas for you. Hopefully you hit pause a couple of times and wrote down a couple ideas that you had opportunities that you want to look into. Maybe problems that you have, that you can then go look inside of crypto to, to find solutions for.
If you have questions about those ideas, if you are looking for solutions for those ideas and you can't find them, come hop into the BitLift Discord, go to bitlift.com/discord. It'll bring in there. That's where I'm hanging out. That's where a lot of people who listen to this podcast are hanging out. And we're talking crypto all day.
You'll see people flinging shit coins. You'll see people, dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin. You'll get some noise there, but this is where you can also get your questions answered. So come hang out and let's ride this next cycle together.
And again, we're early in the cycle. That's why I'm talking on the pod right now. Maybe I might just kill the pod once things get going, because at that point everyone's looking for the wrong advice anyway, right? Now's the time to really be spending time in crypto paying attention, averaging into these projects.
You know, your front running Wall Street right now. Like, hopefully you got in before this ETF, right? Like, these guys have waited 10 years, are talking about Bitcoin for 10 years and they hadn't pulled the trigger. They're about to. That can only mean good things for Bitcoin. Hopefully that means good things for the rest of the crypto economy as well. Hopefully, we all go along for that ride and, let's get after it guys.