Teeka Tiwari - Not Buying Bitcoin Will Be Your Biggest Regret

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JohnPaul and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders [00:00:16] in this space.

[00:00:17] JohnPaul is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:43] Welcome to the Digital Gold Podcast. Today I’m here with Tika Torari who is an executive chairman and strategy board at DeFi Technologies, a company aiming to become the world leader in offering services built upon decentralized finance. Tika’s impressive track record of a cryptocurrency market analyst has positioned him as a trusted source for market predictions. [00:01:02] Tika, as an investment analyst, has credited with being one of the first experts to explore cryptocurrencies. He writes the most widely read premium crypto news in the world, Palm Beach Confidential. He was voted the most trusted person in crypto in July 2019. Welcome to the show. I’m excited to have you here today.

Teeka: [00:01:17] Thanks JP. It’s a pleasure to be here. So get me started and put me, understand when you got into cryptocurrency and how you started this premium newsletter Palm Beach Confidential? Well the first thing to remember is I come from a traditional finance background. So I [00:01:34] started working in Lehman Brothers in the late 1980s. And when I first became exposed to Bitcoin in 2011, I thought the same thing that most people raised in the traditional finance field think when they first come upon Bitcoin. It’s a Ponzi, it’s magic internet money. It’s not based on cash flows. There’s no model that I can use to determine whether

Teeka: [00:01:58] it has value or not. How can I distinguish it from any other piece of code that can also create these units of supposed value? And so I dismissed Bitcoin. And at the time I think it was about $7 a Bitcoin. And I said okay, this is something that is a Ponzi scheme. It will boom and then it will bust. So in 2014, 2015, of course you had a massive [00:02:22] boom in Bitcoin and then you had a massive bust. Now one thing I’ve learned JP working in finance in the 80s is that when you have a fraud, every single fraud, when it’s discovered, it goes to zero. It might not go to zero immediately, but it’s ultimately destined to go to zero. Well Bitcoin, the Bitcoin bubble had blown up for two years and it still had a $6 billion

Teeka: [00:02:49] market cap. And so what I realized in that moment was that this was not a fraud. Fords go to zero. And the next thing I realized was that I had made an enormous mistake and that I had not viewed this asset correctly. And the real truth is that I did not take the time to study this asset. I gave it a cursory glance. I read a couple of highly [00:03:15] slanted articles in the popular press and didn’t and was intellectually lazy when it came to Bitcoin. And so I rectified that in late 2015, early 2016, I threw myself completely into understanding what this was. And most importantly, what the blockchain is. I think if you ask most people what the blockchain is, they say they know what it is. But if

Teeka: [00:03:37] you ask them to describe it, they have no way of describing it. It reminds me of that British show where the lady has to, she’s the head of IT for her whole corporation, but she doesn’t know what IT stands for. And people are quizzing her on what IT stands for. And she spends 20 minutes avoiding the question. So when I finally understood what a blockchain [00:03:57] was, the ability to move value, store data in a way that did not require a third party, a trusted third party. When I really understood that, I knew that that idea was worth trillions of dollars. It was something that had never existed before. And then when I saw how Bitcoin was designed, but most importantly, how it was being adopted, who was flocking to it,

Teeka: [00:04:24] how it was being used, how it was being secured through proof of work. And when I first saw proof of work, I thought, Oh my goodness, what a waste of electricity. And then I realized that no, if you look at what backs the American dollar, the ESG impact of the entire American military complex, a $600 billion a year industry, the petro dollar is what backs up the American [00:04:49] dollar. I then looked at gold, and then I looked at the traditional banking system. Each one of those use far more energy and a far more damaging to the environment than Bitcoin is. And the other thing that I realized was, is that this was a low price to pay in terms of the energy use for what Bitcoin could offer the world. Stateless money that nobody could ever dilute,

Teeka: [00:05:13] that us as individuals could hold that nobody could expropriate from us. If you think about all through human history, even from the time of cavemen, a stronger man has always been able to take the resources of a weaker man, always. And Bitcoin, if you were smart and didn’t tell people you owned it, this was a way for you to own an asset that no man government, no one could ever take from you. [00:05:41] And again, I realized that this was something that had never existed before in human history. And so it was going to be, it made sense that it was deeply understood. We are creatures that work from a frame of reference. And if we have no frame of reference, we avoid something because it’s too scary. But the people that can get in there early and understand it and create a frame of reference

Teeka: [00:06:03] for it are the people that obviously make enormous amounts of money because they get into new ideas very early, whether it was the early days of computing or chips or even something as pedestrian now as the VCR of a walkman, right? We had no frame of reference for a music player that we could carry around and listen to hours of music. When that came out in the 1980s, it was, [00:06:25] we were mind blown that that could exist. So when people have this visceral response to Bitcoin, I get it. I understand. I don’t vilify them for it. I don’t call them stupid for it. It’s actually quite rational because this type of asset has never existed before. So what I try to do is take people down the path that I did in a rational way to help them understand just how powerful

Teeka: [00:06:51] this asset is and just how valuable I think it can become. But anyway, that’s a long story, not made short in terms of how I became a believer in Bitcoin and started really evangelizing Bitcoin in my newsletter business. I love it. And I want to go back to your time in the Lehman Brothers 1980s and then 2011. You mentioned that when we’re evaluating Bitcoin, you can’t use the [00:07:15] traditional models of cash flow. Is it a stock? What am I owning a piece of? There’s no company, there’s no CEO. And for me, that was, I think, one of the hardest things to explain to my uncle and to my family. When I was at 13 years old, 14 years old, getting into crypto, I’m like, why is Bitcoin a value? Well, it’s this blockchain. It can decentralize trust. What does that mean?

Teeka: [00:07:36] So trying to explain this concept, that it’s a completely different animal. So I guess my question to you is when people hear about Bitcoin the first time, it’s usually from a media report. What questions do they need to ask to get from the traditional finance world of this asset isn’t cash flowing, this asset isn’t doing, doesn’t look like a stock, doesn’t look like a bond to, [00:07:55] okay, this asset is going to revolutionize the whole world and how we trade data and trust across the world. How do you help people get over that gap in that bridge? Well, the first thing I do is I say that Bitcoin is not the first asset that doesn’t have intrinsic value as laid out by, let’s say, Graham and Dodd securities analysis, right, or FASB accounting rules. Diamonds

Teeka: [00:08:21] have no inherent value. I mean, they have a limited industrial value that are used on diamond stores, but the diamond market is a multi billion dollar massive market. And they’re stones. The only value they have is based upon how sparkly they are. And they’re certainly not rare. The idea that something has to have intrinsic value as measured by our traditional sources of measurement, [00:08:48] but I think we’ve shown as humans that that’s not true. You can take a piece of art that is two lines on a paper that sells for $30 million. Why is that 30 worth $30 million? Because enough people believe it is. And so let’s tie this to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, to me, it’s highest and best use as I see it now. And I reserve the right to evolve my view on Bitcoin. But in the world,

Teeka: [00:09:12] in the snapshot of time we’re in right now, JP, to me, Bitcoin’s highest and best use is a store of value. If you look at all stores of value, they are designed in a way where they degrade in value over time. So if you look at gold, gold has traditionally been a phenomenal store of value. Well, when you create a paper market for gold that is maybe 100 times bigger than gold, and you add [00:09:38] mining on top of that, gold is not as rare as you would imagine it would be, right? It’s very easy to dilute gold. Well, then you look at real estate. Well, real estate typically has been a way that the families have been able to pass wealth across generations. But governments have gotten smarter now, right? So governments not only hit you with inheritance tax, but they hit you with

Teeka: [00:10:00] ongoing taxes every single year. So we really do not have a peerless source of value that will survive through time. So if I think about my children, their children, and their children’s children, I have before Bitcoin no easy way to pass value down 50 years, 60 years, 80 years down the line. But Bitcoin solves that. And so what people then say is, well, what’s to stop anybody [00:10:29] else from just doing the same thing? And I will say, they did. We had the Bitcoin wars. And guess what? Bitcoin core one, right? So I say, you’ve got to look at the amount of people that have come around this to secure this network. You’ve got to look at the amount of value that’s been aggregated around this and say, okay, this thing recently was worth a trillion dollars. It’s the fastest asset

Teeka: [00:10:51] in the world to a trillion dollars. And it got there without the support of the global financial system. And it got there being the most attacked asset I have ever seen. I’ll give you an example, binary options are probably one of the worst financial products the world has ever created. And those got approved like that by this CC Bitcoin is there’s only ever going to be 21 million of [00:11:16] them made. It’s the most transparent asset ever created in the world. And yet it has received more regulatory pushback than any other asset I have ever seen. And I’ve been in the financial space since the late 80s, right? I’ve seen a boom in all different types of exotic derivatives that have been approved and are accepted every single day. Well, I’ll tell you this, I’d rather

Teeka: [00:11:39] take a one Bitcoin than a credit default swap any day of the week credit default swaps crushed the United States in 2008. But the way that Bitcoin is designed is you can’t rehypoticate it. You can’t take one Bitcoin and lend it out 500 times. You know why? Because we’ve got the blockchain. So this asset represents such a threat to the existing status quo because the existing status [00:12:04] quo takes one asset and relends it multiple times. And that’s called rehypotication. If you’re asking yourself there, why is the traditional financial world have been so negative on Bitcoin? Why a central bank so negative on Bitcoin? The negative on Bitcoin because one, they can’t control it. And two, is it brings 100% transparency to the financial system in a way that has never existed

Teeka: [00:12:32] before. And that to me, when you’re thinking about making a bet on crypto, make a bet on transparency, the Gen Zs, this new generation coming up, in my opinion, are the transparency generation. They will embrace transparency at scale. And if I’m right, and I believe I am, then Bitcoin is the peerless transparency asset the world has ever seen. I love it. I love the conviction that you have. [00:13:00] And the fact that this transparency, I think it’s something that we’ve received in the cryptocurrency mining space in the big thing of like, Oh, Bitcoin’s energy usage, as you mentioned earlier, and that conversation actually came up last night. And immediately for me, I started explaining here’s the benefits Bitcoin miners provide to the grid. We can shut off down our

Teeka: [00:13:17] miners when everyone else needs them. We help build more renewable energy because we have steady demand. But at the end of the day, that stuff doesn’t really matter. The goal is to show, look, energy usage is good. Energy usage happens all across the world. It’s what builds society, what’s moves society forward. The goal is that energy usage, creating more value than it’s [00:13:37] using. And not even that is it creating enough more value where people are having the ability to hold real value without having to rely on our nations. Think about it. We can create a monetary system that doesn’t rely on guns and missiles and boats. Exactly. It relies on electrons. Like, right. That’s something we need to share to the world. And it’s so hard because of the media.

Teeka: [00:13:56] Like, just the thing you said, it’s the most attacked asset out there. Like, it’s unreal how much the media comes after Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. And it’s crazy to hear that the SEC would approve any of these assets because the ETF like, no, we can’t give you access to the most transparent network in the world. The asset that’s running without any intermediaries, [00:14:15] the asset that runs 24 seven and has no downtime. We can’t sorry, we can’t do that. The best store value in the world because it’s unsafe, right? It’s insane that these messages are being put out. What do you, how do you view the relationship between Bitcoin in the energy industry? Do you have any thoughts there on how Bitcoin is created? And basically for me, my thoughts are,

Teeka: [00:14:36] when you own a Bitcoin, you’re really owning a portion of time where all this energy was used to protect the Bitcoin network in that block. And you’re buying a piece of that energy usage across the whole world. And you’re owning that piece. And there was a great article about Bitcoin as time and how Bitcoin is the best way to pass on wealth to your generations. I think, as you

JohnPaul: [00:14:53] mentioned, that is the number one reason why we need Bitcoin. But how do you see the energy industry

Teeka: [00:14:58] in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining coming to play and interacting over the coming years, especially with the China news? I think 10 years from now, when we look back, we will see the Bitcoin mining did more for the adoption of green energy than any amount of cars that were sold by Tesla. Because think about it, right? For Bitcoin mining to work, you cannot pay [00:15:22] the same rate for electricity that I pay as a consumer, right? So Bitcoin mining is never pulling power away from other consumers, period, because other consumers pay more for it. Exactly. Bitcoin, if you look at where the biggest Bitcoin mines are, or at least were, they were in places that had stranded energy that were creating an abundance of energy that could

Teeka: [00:15:44] not be sold to anyone. Anyone. So that energy was going to be generated regardless and thrown out, at least this way, it’s being redirected. And here’s the second piece of that. If I own a store, and I can only sell 70% of my goods and 30% have to go in the garbage, and all of a sudden, I can find a buyer for that other 30%. What does that do? Maybe it means I can make my store bigger, [00:16:08] I can provide better service to my customers because I have more profits, right? So this is the beauty of what Bitcoin can do for the adoption of renewable energy. Bitcoin miners can go into areas that maybe only have 5,000 people that cannot support a massive grid operation from, they might have an abundance of hydropower, but the dollars and cents just don’t make sense. So they say, okay,

Teeka: [00:16:34] we’ll write the check, we’ll build the hydropower, we’ll give you our energy for free, and we’ll take the balance, right? That’s what you can do deals like that and have them make economic sense with Bitcoin mining. You want to talk about helping raise people out of poverty, helping change people’s lives, give them cheap energy, and this is what Bitcoin can do. I love it, helping raise [00:16:56] people out of poverty. It’s one of those things that for me has been a trend in my life. I went to Honduras and lived there when I was only 16 years old for a month, and I saw that. The reason why these citizens weren’t able to live the life that I lived in the United States was came down to one word, and that word was infrastructure. They didn’t have the infrastructure because the government

Teeka: [00:17:15] was corrupt and their monetary system was corrupt, and they didn’t have steady supply of energy, which prevented them from living the life that they should be living. And it all comes down to that and energy usage and availability. So one of the things we’re working on now is like a power plant. So if you have a power plant, let’s say in India or Pakistan, and they’re looking to build [00:17:33] a new one, we go to them and we say, we’d like you guys to add an additional 400 megawatts of power to this power plant. We’ll buy it from you 24 seven, so you can build it out, you will pay for it. But the next thing is, is when you need to sell that power to the community, we’ll turn everything off for you. And that, like you said, that’s going to uplift communities, going to lower the

Teeka: [00:17:50] energy costs down, and it’s going to help build societies because Bitcoin miners can come into areas where there wasn’t a need before. So I’m super excited to hear that you share a similar

JohnPaul: [00:17:59] view on that. How do you see Bitcoin playing out in the next three to five years, either in

Teeka: [00:18:03] like Lightning Network, either technology adoption, this transparency movement you’re talking about,

JohnPaul: [00:18:09] can you talk a little bit more about your views in the future? Yeah, I think over the next five

Teeka: [00:18:13] years, and I’ve written about this and I’ve stated it publicly, I think over the next within five years, you will see significant adoption on Bitcoin. If you look at what’s going on with NIDIG, NIDIG is cutting deals with Pfizer, which is one of the biggest financial services company in the United States. They’re cutting deals with community banks at scale, where they’re going to [00:18:38] be offering the plumbing for these banks to offer Bitcoin services to their customers. We’re talking about taking Bitcoin to mom and pop America. So if you think about this from the early days of the telephone, so AT&T, in the very beginning, it was incredibly expensive, very slow, and it was only in very wealthy cities. If you lived anywhere else, you probably thought

Teeka: [00:19:01] to yourself, why do I need a telephone? If I need to talk to somebody, I’m just going to go over to my neighbor’s house and talk to them. And people thought that way about electricity, too. They had to hire salespeople in order to convince people to put electricity in their house. So in the beginning, these things are quite difficult. But when you make it easy for everybody, which is what NIDIG is [00:19:20] doing, you cross this point where people go from, why would I want to do that to why would I not want to do that? I’ve seen the same thing occur in my lifetime with cell phones, whereas people were thinking, why do I need a cell phone in the early 90s? By the late 90s, everybody had a cell phone. Then in the early 00s, why do I need a smartphone? And then by 2012, everybody had a

Teeka: [00:19:40] smartphone. So I think we’ll see the same adoption type curve here in Bitcoin. And of course, it’s going to cost the price of Bitcoin to go considerably higher. And so do you think Bitcoin, for being in the space for so long, you see that it doesn’t scale linearly? That’s how most people look at it as a stock. Oh, it’s up 10%, 20%. That’s really high, [00:19:58] but you Bitcoin scales logarithmically because of the mining, having a van and the 21 million

[00:20:03] aspect of it. Orm provides a bridge to the digital currency mining world for individual investors,

Teeka: [00:20:09] financial institutions, and energy companies. By combining over 70 years of mining experience, 24-7 management, and directly aligned incentives, Orm’s managed mining program is the simplest way to enter the digital currency mining market. To learn more, please visit OrmCapitalCenchers.com. So you’re quoted in February in CS, this Seattle Weekly published an article saying that, [00:20:33] by the end of 2021, Bitcoin could hit $650,000 per Bitcoin. 2021? No, I didn’t say that. Okay. Let’s clarify it on the record then. What was that statement? And do you still believe Bitcoin can grow to that type of level in the next couple of years? Yeah, I think within five years, Bitcoin could be a half a million dollars of Bitcoin. Okay. Yes. And when you,

Teeka: [00:20:53] when someone hears that today, it’s like a Bitcoin’s $35,000. How is that possible? What is it just the integration of the mom and pop’s here mentioning? Is it just time playing out? It’s an adoption story. What it is, is as the asset gets more adopted, as people understand how to value the asset, and the way that people have approached this asset [00:21:15] from a valuation standpoint has changed a lot, just over the last five, six years since I’ve been involved. When I first discovered Bitcoin and recommended it, it was $428. When I first recommended it, it was $428. And what I said to people then, people told me, well, it’s really difficult to buy and I want to wait till it’s easy to buy.

Teeka: [00:21:33] I said, if you wait till it’s easy to buy, it’s going to cost $40,000 Bitcoin. The fact that it’s difficult to buy and not many people loan it, you’re going to get a great price. And so I will say that is still true today. Not many people loan it. I think maybe 20% of Americans own it globally. It’s a tiny percentage. Maybe 150 million people in the world own some Bitcoin. [00:21:56] There are 7 billion people on the planet, 4 billion smartphones, 5 billion phones in general. To me, this looks like buying Apple computer in 2003. At the very beginning of its adoption cycle. So I think as it gets more adopted, the price will have to go higher. I want to change directions and talk about building on top of Bitcoin or building on top of

JohnPaul: [00:22:19] blockchain technology. So DeFi Technologies is a company that you’re part of. Can you talk to me

Teeka: [00:22:25] more about what your goal is, what the mission is, and how you guys are working today and then in the future and how you’re looking to bring this next wave of financial innovation? Well, DeFi.tech is a publicly traded company. It’s the first company I’ve decided to work with. And what I love about what they’re doing is that they are making it easier for the everyday person [00:22:47] to get direct exposure to these DeFi protocols. And let me be very clear. I think decentralized finance is after Bitcoin, the killer app. There’s just so much money to be made as this trend starts to play out. We’re talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars of value long term that will be unlocked. If you think about the way that the traditional financial system is built right

Teeka: [00:23:14] now, it’s built on technology that’s from the 1950s to 1960s and the 1970s. Mainframe, Fortran, Pascal, these ancient languages, the people that know how to program them, they’re dying. There’s just not many of them left. So what decentralized finance is going to do is disintermediate all of these businesses. So I think the opportunity there is huge. However, here’s the problem. [00:23:43] Unless you are technologically savvy, it’s difficult to go use my ether wallet and then link with Uniswap and buy this token or buy that token, sell this token, sell that token. So what I love what DeFi.tech is doing is that they are creating securities where people can go out and get direct exposure to DeFi protocols the same way they buy any stock. And they’re doing it in this commission

Teeka: [00:24:08] free way. And so I think if you pull back the camera and if you look at traditional companies, how value will aggregate around traditional companies that are involved in crypto, I think you’ve got to look at those companies that are making it easier for the rest of the world to get involved in crypto. So look at Coinbase, a $50 billion market cap. Huge. It’s insane. [00:24:29] And what have they done? They’ve just made it easy to buy Bitcoin. So I think we’ll continue to see this type of value aggregation take place across different companies, which is why I’m involved in DeFi.tech because I believe a lot of value will accrue to them as they start rolling out new products, making it easier for people to get direct exposure to different protocols without

Teeka: [00:24:52] having to mess around with my ether wallet. That is the future is bringing down the breaking down that barrier to entry. And so I’m glad to hear that you’re passionate about it. That people are working on this when you mentioned they’re like providing direct exposure. They’re going to hold the tokens like when you buy Uniswap share or something, they’re going to buy Uniswap tokens. [00:25:09] These are exchange traded products, ETPs. So very similar to way that other exchange change products work. So they have one for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, Cardano. And so you’re essentially got this one to one relationship. You don’t have that slippage and you don’t have any fees. So it’s a very unique product in the marketplace. That makes more sense. That’s what we need to get

Teeka: [00:25:33] to the institutional and the retail investors to be able to, I think, to access DeFi because it is complicated. If people think Bitcoin is complicated, DeFi, that’s a whole other level. And it’s

JohnPaul: [00:25:45] thankfully getting to a much better spot. So I’m excited to see how you guys can continue to grow.

Teeka: [00:25:51] And you guys are usually publicly traded so people can get exposure. Yeah, D-E-F-T-F. And let me be clear. I own shares in the company. I work with the company. Let me be very clear. Anything I say about the company is biased. I love the company, but I’m biased. So you should do your own homework. Trust but verify, guys. And keep on looking into it. And if you haven’t [00:26:14] checked out DeFi on the podcast, you definitely need to check out Uniswap and some of these other big platforms. Do you have any DeFi protocols or tokens that you like to point people in that are really disrupting the space or doing unique things? I think what Uniswap is doing is incredible. We first started getting involved in Uniswap. When I say we, I mean my readers, just to be clear,

Teeka: [00:26:36] JP, I’m not allowed to invest in anything that I recommend. So yeah, I can only buy Bitcoin and Ethereum. And so anything else, whether it’s a stock or whether it’s a coin, I’m not allowed to own. And it’s to prevent conflicts of interest. And in our business, we only have one source of income. And that is the price that we charge for our newsletters. So we don’t sell any advertising. [00:27:00] We don’t do listswaps. We don’t, and nothing like that. So the only avenue we have is right and great, great research and charging for it. And I love that because if we don’t write great research, we don’t make money. And how often is that research like published,

JohnPaul: [00:27:16] in cadence, what type of conversations are covered? Can you talk about that?

Teeka: [00:27:20] I have two cryptocurrency related newsletters. One is called the crypto income, which is predominantly defi oriented income oriented coins, and then Palm Beach confidential. And we put out an issue each month, and generally we’ll have at least one idea a month in each of those issues. But to get to Uniswap, I think that Uniswap has just gotten beat up really badly with this pullback. [00:27:43] I mean, think about this. It took 10 years, a half a billion dollars and 1200 employees to build Coinbase. Uniswap was doing the same daily volume as Coinbase within six weeks of launching, but they did it with 11 employees, and I think less than $10 million in the adventure capital. That’s the power of DeFi. You cannot compete against that edge. It’s the reason

Teeka: [00:28:09] why Blockbuster went out of business when Netflix came in. Blockbuster had 1000 stores, and Netflix had zero stores was delivering all their content online. It means that their cost to push a product out was virtually zero, whereas your cost is billions of dollars, just to hold the 1000 locations. When you look at a fight like that, it doesn’t matter how much [00:28:35] money Blockbuster had or how much capital they had access to, there was no way they could defeat Netflix. It was impossible just because of the cost structure. If you look at centralized exchanges versus decentralized exchanges, once Ethereum goes to Proof of Stake and those gas fees, go down. These guys all go out of business. I mean, maybe not completely, but they lose 90%

Teeka: [00:29:01] of their revenue. That’s why I can’t buy Coinbase. Yeah, because it’s like you said, DeFi is the edge. It makes everything 10 times easier, and those numbers are staggering that Uniswalls putting out. That’s one of the most powerful thing about these spaces. It’s the permission list. They’re growing so fast, and it’s allowing anyone to move capital across the [00:29:19] world without any permissions, without any, they need to get your approval. Hey, I need to get this bank’s approval. I need to get this intermediary. None of that. It’s a frictionless, instantaneous. That’s why I’m also very bullish on DeFi. I’m trying to figure out how do you integrate cryptocurrency mining into DeFi? If I had to ask you that question, what comes to mind?

Teeka: [00:29:35] Like a physical assets, even like lumber or commodities in the real world, real estate, how do you start integrating that into DeFi technology and providing people exposure to those asset classes through DeFi? I think that I’m going to peek into my crystal bowl here for a second. But I think that question will be answered probably five years from now, because you’re going to need [00:30:00] a regulatory framework. Let’s think about what you would need for that. You would need a standard where you could take an asset like lumber. Right now, lumber is standardized through future contracts. You would need somebody to approve a standardization where you could create a digital token and then move that onto an exchange that you could actually start trading. Well, that’s not

Teeka: [00:30:23] going to happen without the traditional financial world getting involved. Then another area that I’ve thought a lot about is bringing decentralized finance and funding into real estate deals. But again, you need to have at least some element of standards or some players come together and say, okay, we’re adopting this standard for different cash flows. And I just think we’re not there yet. [00:30:48] That’s going to happen in the future. But then it’ll be exciting when it happens, but we’re not there yet. I definitely agree with you. It’s hard to have the standards of cryptocurrency mining is not every machine is critically. One machine might have been running in a dust environment. One machine might have been running in a moist environment. Now, this one has not mowed on up a

Teeka: [00:31:06] rust on it. This one isn’t working anymore. And so if we’re dealing with physical equipment into the blockchain world is a lot, you’d almost have to like, it’s like every asset has to be unique, like an NFT. But at the same time, there’s a ton of risk to that. And every asset has to be in a bucket now where you diversify that risk across the board of investors. What’s a problem that you [00:31:24] face every day that nobody has solved yet or people aren’t really thinking about? But you’re thinking about it. You just noticed in your day to day life. So a problem as it relates to what? As it relates to your work, your personal life, it could be just anything that comes to mind that’s like, dang, I wish I had a solution for this. I would say this, my mission in life is to help

Teeka: [00:31:45] people move the needle on their net worth without putting their current life at risk. And so this is why I am so fanatical about crypto and why I have been for the last five years, even when we’ve been down 80, 90%. I’ve never lost that vision. I would say the biggest impediment to that, and it’s something I’ve been hearing ever since 2016 is how can I buy it right now? It’s gone [00:32:08] up too much. People tell me that at Ethereum at nine. People tell me that at Bitcoin at 400, 600, 700, 1000, 2000, 3000, 3000, 4000, 20,000, 15,000. I would say that’s my biggest impediment that I’m trying to solve to try to help people understand that it’s not too late. There’s still enormous upside ahead and compare to any other asset that I follow, stocks, bonds, commodities,

Teeka: [00:32:37] private shares, public shares. There’s nothing that has the return potential of Bitcoin. Even now, even at 30,000, even at 60,000, it has phenomenal return potential, more so than any other asset that I’m aware of. And so that’s the message that I keep banging on about. I love that message. I have the same issue, right? It’s like this thing’s way too high price. That’s [00:33:00] probably why Dogecoin went up so much because people are like, I can get my Dogecoin, get one Dogecoin for a dollar. But at the end of the day, it’s like, is it getting people to think about denominating their life in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in Dogecoin? Or is it more of just them understanding that their dollar is losing value? So then by them not doing anything, they’re hurting their

Teeka: [00:33:20] net worth. They’re not growing their wealth, where Bitcoin is only going to grow in value because it is scarce. What kind of counter arguments do you have to that? What I have said from the very beginning is put 1% of your money into this. And if you really like what I’m doing, put 3 to 5% in. And if you’re under 30, put 10% in and leave it alone. If you lose anywhere from 1 to 3% of your net worth, [00:33:44] it’s not pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world. And if you’re under 30 and you lose 10% of your net worth, it’s really not a big deal. You got another 20, 30 years to make it back. So what I tell people is, think about if you’re wrong. Forget about the little bit of money that you’d put up. But imagine you’re wrong and Bitcoin goes to a half a million, a million dollars a

Teeka: [00:34:07] Bitcoin. And you had the opportunity to buy it at 30,000, 15,000, 20,000, 1,400. What’s that cost to you? What’s that regret going to cost you? And the reason why I speak so passionately about that is I went through that regret in the 80s and 90s. I got scared out of my Microsoft in 1991. I got scared out of Oracle in 1991 when it dropped 85%. I thought that Microsoft had gotten as big as [00:34:38] it was ever going to get in 1995. All these errors that people are making now, I made them. And they cost me personally tens of millions of dollars. And my clients that were relying on me probably lost down on a $100 million or more on profits. Because I advise them, oh, we can’t buy Microsoft. It’s gone up too much. Oh, we can’t buy Oracle. It’s way too volatile. Let’s go buy some Eastman Kodak.

Teeka: [00:35:04] I mean, come on. So that left such a deep impression upon me that I swore when that opportunity came again, when I would see another transformational period of time, like we saw in the late 80s and early 90s in tech, I swore that I would go all in on it and that I would do everything in my power to help my clients or my readers now make the most money they could out of that trend. [00:35:31] The biggest regret, I think, of the world will be not buying Bitcoin soon enough. That’s where we are because people are saying that exact same reason. It’s too high. It’s too much. I’m getting scared because I don’t understand the technology. I don’t understand where we’re going as a society, where we’re going as an industry and how disruptive it’s going to be. Like you said,

JohnPaul: [00:35:48] Microsoft back in the day. What advice would you give to your younger self, your 18 year old self,

Teeka: [00:35:54] if you have to sit back and into place, is it that advice of it’s not going too high, but that’s

JohnPaul: [00:35:59] almost like a safety mechanism. That can be helpful. So what advice would you give your

Teeka: [00:36:03] younger self now that you’ve been around the block? What I would tell my 18 year old self is believe in your vision of the world and work like the devil is on your back and work like you’re going to die next week. And you’ve got to get this done now. The other thing I would say is when you’re young, you have a tendency to fall into despair very easily when things don’t work [00:36:26] out. So I want everybody listening here now, if you’re young, it’s normal that things don’t work out. It’s normal that you get smacked in the face by life with failure after failure after failure after failure after failure. That’s not the world having its way with you. That’s the process that you need to go through in order to learn to be better. I have made so many horrible mistakes

Teeka: [00:36:51] through my life as a younger man that I deeply regret that I wish I could take back. So the thing is, is that I can’t take them back. And so what I have to do is draw the lesson for them and use them to make me a better man today. And so I will say that to anybody listening right now, embrace failure. Okay, failure is your greatest teacher. Don’t let it beat you down. And certainly [00:37:12] don’t personalize it. Take the lesson and move on. And that’s what I tell my youngest self. That is great. Believe in your vision. Your vision has been great to hear on the podcast. I’ve I mean, enjoyed it tremendously. These are the advocates I wake up and, you know, every day I’m so glad that are supporting Bitcoin out of their goodness of their heart. Like,

Teeka: [00:37:30] when I tell people about Bitcoin, I let them know like, I’m not financially going to make any money from this. You’re going to buy into Bitcoin. You’re going to have a better lifestyle. But it’s not me that’s profiting. I’m not I don’t own the company. I don’t have shares and I own my own coins. And I think that’s one of the disconnects people expect you to be getting value from [00:37:46] this. But really, you’re just providing this information. You’re saying, Hey, check me out. I write a good newsletter. At the same time, here’s opportunities that you can take. And you don’t even you don’t need to pay me a dime. And the map right there is a heartless movement that I

JohnPaul: [00:37:58] I’m so glad that people like you out there really pushing it. So thanks again for that.

Teeka: [00:38:02] And on that note, you know, where can our listeners connect with you online? Yeah. So I can get Palm Beach group.com. And then if they want to find out more about DeFi technologies, they can go to DeFi.tech, D-E-C-T-E-C-H. And of course, the ticker symbol is D-E-F-T-F for DeFi technologies. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on today on the show for [00:38:25] the listeners to just to kind of jump into? Yeah, I haven’t hit on yet. I do. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time pondering Bitcoin. And what I’ve really come to the conclusion of is that Bitcoin might be the most elegant series of self-reinforcing incentives I have ever seen. When I think about how Bitcoin has grown, how fast it’s grown, how do we go from Jamie Diamond,

Teeka: [00:38:54] who is the CEO of arguably the most powerful bank in the world, in 2017, saying Bitcoin is a fraud, a fire, anybody that trades it, to now his analysts have a $300,000 price target. And they’re offering Bitcoin to their clients. Think about that, JP. Think about that. The most hated asset in the world from a regulatory standpoint has the most powerful banker in the world going back on what he said [00:39:20] and adopting it. That’s how powerful the self-reinforcing these incentives are. So now when you have Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and JP Morgan, Mass Mutual, all buying this asset, what happens now? Will they become defenders of the network? Do you see how the beauty of Bitcoin, how it turns enemies into protectors? Because that’s the beauty of Bitcoin. The self-reinforcing

Teeka: [00:39:51] incentives have brought into the fold Bitcoin’s most severe enemies. You want to talk about the most powerful group of people on the planet? They’re bankers. Bankers completely trashed the global economy in 2008, and not one of them went to jail. There’s not a mob boss on the planet that has that kind of power. That’s the craziness of the financial system. But you’re right, [00:40:14] Bitcoin sucks you in and it says, here’s an opportunity to make a better system. When that can be beneficial to the world, when that’s going to help build society. And it shows you that there is no other way. Bitcoin doesn’t care how old you are, what race you are, what you believe in. It’s there and it will always be there. And that’s one thing that I think the media tries

Teeka: [00:40:33] to portray that it tries to make Bitcoin choose the side. And in the day, Bitcoin really doesn’t

JohnPaul: [00:40:39] care. I think that’s very, very powerful. This was amazing. I appreciate the time. Like I said,

Teeka: [00:40:43] this got me pumped up. I’m taking notes. I’m going to go back and journal some more and do some

JohnPaul: [00:40:48] tweets on Twitter. But this was amazing. So thanks again for jumping on. Is anything else you wanted

Teeka: [00:40:53] to mention? The only other thing I would say is, look, Bitcoin is going to be volatile for years. On any given day, you can wake up and your holdings are cut in half. Do not make the mistake of confusing short term action with long term erosion of value. Think about things like Amazon that dropped 90%. I think once 80%, once and then 60% multiple times, 40% more times than I can count, [00:41:22] value creation is not linear. I wish it was. I wish it was. It’s not. It’s a massive move up, a massive move down, a massive move up, a slightly less massive move down. And that’s just the way it works. I don’t know why it works that way. But to get mad at it is to get mad at the sun rising in the East and setting in the West. It just is what it is. And the sooner you can accept it,

Teeka: [00:41:51] the easier your life will be. And just say, that’s just Bitcoin being Bitcoin. And then just carry on with the rest of your day. I love it. And my only other thing I would add to that is the farther you put your Bitcoins away from you, so not being able to just access on your phone, immediately sell them, send them away, the longer you’ll be able to hold them. So remove them from your device, [00:42:09] put them aside, get them on a paper wall, get them on cold storage, because then it makes it really hard to go selling it to be intentional about that. That’s one of the things that I was in as a young kid getting into Bitcoin wasn’t very intentional. It was like, oh, buying, selling, trading, but I didn’t get to really have that conviction just a whole, those diamond hands,

JohnPaul: [00:42:26] which everyone talks about now. But thanks again, Tika, for coming on the podcast. This was an

[00:42:30] amazing time. Remember, guys, mine on. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Digital Gold. Be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops. Don’t forget to leave us a

Teeka: [00:42:41] five star review to support our journey to become the number one crypto podcast. Thanks so much

[00:42:45] for listening. And until next time, mine on.