Bitcoin Is Dead
Welcome to Bitcoin is Dead, the ultimate Bitcoin variety show where host Trey takes you on a journey through the ever-evolving world of Bitcoin. Each episode brings new personalities, fascinating locations, and insightful conversations with politicians, educators, and innovators shaping the future of Bitcoin. Whether you're a seasoned Bitcoiner or just starting your journey, tune in for thought-provoking discussions, unique perspectives, and a deep dive into the ideas and people driving the Bitcoin revolution.
Bitcoin Is Dead
Traditional finance is here with Reid Bolinger | Bitcoin is Dead
Reid Bolinger is a long term financial advisor from Fisher Wealth Management in Burlington North Carolina. Reid joins us to talk Bitcoin, retirement, death, and with the help of Tom Jones, some new info on taxes. Join us as we learn what the traditional finance world thinks of Bitcoin.
Not financial advice, do your own research.
You can find more on Reid on his profile page.
https://www.fisher-wealthmanagement.com/team/reid-bolinger/
Follow us on Twitter - @BTCisDeadPod
So everyone listening. Welcome back to the Bitcoin is Dead podcast. I'm sitting here with Tom the taxman Jones and Reed Bollinger from Fisher Wealth Management, one of the local wealth management places here in Alamance County, graham right.
Speaker 2:We're in Burlington on.
Speaker 1:Church Street. I can never tell if I'm in Graham or Burlington.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Unless it's downtown, graham, I might as well be in Burlington, right? I don't know where the line is, graham, I might as well be in Burlington because I don't know where the line is. But welcome, thank you for coming on to the show. From our standpoint, we're talking to Alamance County, orange County, central North Carolina businesses without really any concern for what the business is. But in your case, you come from a financial background with a financial firm. So I'm not a financial background with a financial firm. So, right, I'm not a financial advisor.
Speaker 1:Nothing on here should be considered financial advice for anybody listening. Correct, it's purely for entertainment, right, and or common sense. But what I, when I came to you, I thought I can learn from the traditional side and see, do I understand how the traditional side works. Is what I'm hearing in the Bitcoin community, a reflection of how finance actually works in the real world. So I thought let me reach out to a financial firm, see what's going on. So your business, slightly different than what we typically interview, but well within the realm of hey, we're in Alamance, we're community-based. Yeah, we've been here for 1981, right? Yep, 81? Yep, I'm thinking about correct me if I'm wrong. I read about $300 million under management.
Speaker 2:Give or take, they've grown a lot since then.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:The fishers have grown. They're over a billion now A billion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty strong, strong yeah, that is a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess my information might have been from around 2023. Yeah, it was um. Yeah, they uh, probably by the end of 2023 they crossed a billion. Oh wow, so I'm even older than that yeah, probably 2021 or 2020 pre-covid yeah, it's, it's. Uh, yeah, that that's probably some. You know that information was definitely old, so tell us a little about.
Speaker 1:How did you end up at Fisher, what does Fisher do, and how does Fisher contribute to the community outside of just running a business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so thank you for having me Appreciate the invitation. And again, my name is Reed Bollinger. I'm a certified financial planner with Fisher Wealth Management here in Burlington. So I'll start with. I became a financial advisor in 1997. Went to work for a company called Dean Witter who later became Morgan Stanley in Greensboro, and after working there for about three years I got an opportunity to come to work for a little bank called First Union that was in Graham over by the Tasty. Bakery.
Speaker 3:Great donuts.
Speaker 2:Oh golly, I love the Tasty Bakery. So I went to work for First Union, which later became Wells Fargo, which later became Wachovia, which later became Wells Fargo, which later became Wachovia and later became Wells Fargo, and so I stayed there for 21 years and three years ago decided to go independent and went to work for Fisher Wealth Management, went to work for Rick Fisher and Willie Fisher here in Burlington. Wealth Management went to work for Rick Fisher and Willie Fisher here in Burlington and you know, I guess my digital assets crypto journey started. You know when clients would come into the bank you know several years ago and ask me questions about it, and I'll be completely honest with you I knew a little bit about it, but I certainly didn't know what I know now. Honest with you, I knew a little bit about it, but I certainly didn't know what I know now. And so you know you could always, as you all know, there weren't any financial products seven, eight years ago that you could sell to people. There weren't.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin products came out I think it was 2017 or something, so we probably weren't going to sell something like that anyway. So people would come in and ask me questions from time to time and, and you know, I got to the point where we would. We would ask you people to ask questions a lot, and I just didn't know a lot of answers about it. I felt like I could explain mutual funds and stocks and bonds and explain a lot of things, but, especially as Bitcoin became more and more expensive, people became more and more interested and so I decided in 2021 to kind of learn more about it.
Speaker 2:And there's a guy named Rick Edelman I don't know if you guys are familiar with him, but he was Barron's number one financial advisor three times in his career in the whole country and he ended up selling his practice and he started a business and he educates financial professionals on things like digital assets and cryptocurrencies, and so I decided to take some training from him and became interested in the space and the subject, and since then I've gone through a lot of continuing ed with him and gone to a couple of conferences um in in austin right after the convergence conference, um and uh, so that's where I've gotten a lot of my knowledge, um, and it's been. It's been very interesting, do you?
Speaker 1:find that? Do you find that there's more or less? There's more, there's more or less firms getting involved with Bitcoin, at least from an education standpoint, than there was a year or two ago.
Speaker 2:So I would say that there are probably more advisors interested now than there were a few years ago. But I would also say I know a lot of advisors and most advisors probably don't recommend or solicit the ETFs. They're relatively new. Bitcoin isn't, but the ETFs are relatively new and so it's just not quite a part of most advisors' businesses yet.
Speaker 3:When you first began to get questions about cryptocurrency, was it an older crowd, younger crowd, middle age? What age bracket?
Speaker 2:I would say and and tom. I don't remember right off the top of my head how old they were, but I would just say roughly most of them were middle-aged folks yeah and maybe some younger folks. I certainly didn't get a lot of questions from our retirees.
Speaker 3:Exactly exactly.
Speaker 2:And I think people would hear about it in the news and see how well it was doing. And you know we're in the investment business and people want to make money and that's kind of our job, and so it was just that flow of you know, people were like oh, I have a neighbor that's doing well in Bitcoin. Tell me about Bitcoin, so I want to get on the bandwagon?
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly Because I know in my tax practice younger people are more inclined to be looking at the Bitcoin. Of course the elderly people, which will make sense because they're older and they don't want to take a lot of risks. They're not going to be out there trying to speculate because they're coming to the end of their career and again, it just wouldn't make any sense there. And that 35, 40-ish, 45 kind of in between, it's kind of like oh, maybe you know, let me get a little bit more. But I've also found out the individuals got more of a tech background, the whole technology, and I guess you could say it has a lot to do with their level of comfort dealing with the technology. The more comfortable they are with the technology, the more inclined they want to find out about the whole Bitcoin, the crypto, and they want to know, you know, hey, just what is this? What direction? Is it something that would be good for me? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't know about you, but I know very few people that are invested that I wouldn't consider tech savvy in Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:That's part of the reason why we started the podcast was because I recognized my background is a blue collar background. I had no exposure to computers in any real sense prior to 2005, when I joined the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps threw me into a technical field and I grew from there and what I recognized was over the past two or three years, as I've become further and further, both mentally and financially, invested in Bitcoin, was that the people around me could not bridge the gap that I was able to bridge because of my prior exposure to technology. To give an example, when I worked at a company called Heuer Packard Enterprise, we were happy at the time with speeds of one gigabyte a second, internet or local connectivity, so from computer to computer you could transfer one gig file in one second. Under perfect circumstances it doesn't actually work out that way, but, for the sake of argument, by the time I left HPE, I was talking to companies who were demanding 10 gigabyte a second. By the time I left the next job, they were upset about less than 50 gigs per second of throughput and at some point I asked myself what is fast enough? And what I realized was it won't ever be fast enough because the competition will always go just a little bit further to try to beat you out, even if it's just on a product information page.
Speaker 1:So I watched technology evolve in a very measurable way from my time in the Marine Corps, my time at HPE and then on through other jobs. Whereas my friends, their exposure to technology is my computer is fast, my computer is slow. Normally when my computer is slow it means that my computer is old and I need to buy a new one. There's so many nuances in between they don't understand. And when you start talking about Bitcoin and the technical complexities behind it and why those matter, is my computer fast or is my computer slow? Because they just haven't crossed that bridge, they haven't walked that walk, and it's completely understandable. If a plumber wants to talk to me about plumbing, I've only got a certain range of knowledge. I can't bridge the gaps that he can bridge in his head very quickly.
Speaker 1:So when we started the podcast, it became how do I get people who aren't going to be exposed to Bitcoin until it's potentially too late to talk about Bitcoin in a way that makes sense? And what we figured out was go to businesses that are adjacent Bitcoin adjacent even if they don't know it your electricians, your plumbers, financial management, things like that, but also just anyone interested, anybody willing to talk, because if they own a business, they have employees, those employees have families, they have families. It's going to trickle down If we come and talk to the business owner and say you don't have to understand everything. But no, this is the truth of it. It's not what you hear on the news, it's not what you hear about in bar talk. This is the truth and I will tell everybody. I may not be accurate with everything I say, I may get a technicality wrong. It's a deep field, but I promise you, when I told you I thought for sure it was the truth. So I'm going to give out honest information to people that come request it.
Speaker 1:But I also want to be on the other side of the fence. I want to hear about what you do, because I don't know everything and I didn't know anything about Bitcoin five years ago. So I want to talk to other companies and figure out like hey, what do you do? Like talking to the guy from Mevin Electric. Mevin Electric started as a small company, probably a one or two man operation, and now they have a building, they have a couple of employees, a couple of vans.
Speaker 1:Somebody had to have the guts, though, to go out and do that. How did you do it? What did you do? Are you interested in keeping Bitcoin as a treasury asset to hedge against inflation or to expand, kind of? If you got cash in the bank, you can only do so much with that cash in terms of how I can allocate it in a way that makes sense over the short term. If I want to put cash into, like a 401k or a Roth IRA or what have you, that makes sense over the long term. But when I'm a company and I need to increase my cashflow or my holdings over the next three years and a Roth IRA, isn't it? It just it's not it's not enough time.
Speaker 1:When, when you look at Bitcoin, what it can do for businesses like MicroStrategy I'm sure you've seen MicroStrategy, michael Saylor yeah, what it can do for businesses over the longterm is is great, but what it can do for your company over the short term is amazing, michael. I mean, micro strategy was a company Some people had heard of five years ago Now. Anybody who watches the news has at least heard the name. So, yeah, we want to bring businesses in. We want to talk about. We want to bring the people who aren't going to hear about Bitcoin to Bitcoin and vice versa. Yeah, that's kind of where we stand.
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting when I was at this conference, we had a conference call with Michael Saylor. He was actually in Hungary, oh wow, and that was interesting. He's got a great story and anytime I have the opportunity to hear him talk, I'm always interested in listening. But you know, from our perspective as financial planners, I would say that the guys in our office don't allocate towards Bitcoin, and part of that is because, as financial planners and I'm going to speak for myself, not for them I use strategies that are usually managed by other people, and I'll pick a strategy based on someone's risk level we were talking about.
Speaker 2:You know, bitcoin's not an appropriate investment or suitable investment for for some of our elderly clients, and so, as an exercise and I was just curious, I'd never done this I looked at my book of business before I came over here, and 2% of my book of business is considered aggressive, and so 2% of the people in my book are considered aggressive and, by the way, I have an account there at the firm and I consider myself an aggressive investor, and so I probably represent some of that percentage. So, you know, as a rule, we just haven't allocated yet, for a couple of reasons One is risk Two we have other people managing the portfolio, as we kind of match up people with the appropriate portfolio, and so you know I can't change my strategy to manage people's money based on whether or not I think they should buy Bitcoin or not.
Speaker 2:I happen to like it. I think there's a future in it. I would also tell people and this is just my opinion if you're looking at your overall portfolio, an allocation of 1% to 2%, if it goes to zero which I don't think, any of us think that's going to happen but if it went to zero, if you had one or two percent of your money and something like that, it's not going to kill you, right? So, um, but, um. So those are those are some of the reasons I happen to believe in it. I'm interested in the subject um, you know, because I think there's a future, and I'm just as interested in blockchain technology.
Speaker 2:But, you know, from a business standpoint, it may show up in some of the portfolios and we just don't know it. I mean, the managers have a lot of leeway. They can manage the money however they want to, but I would say that it doesn't show up on a level where, when we're reporting back to clients, here are the top 50 holdings in your account. I've never seen any. And, of course, the ETFs are relatively new, but I haven't seen any of the ETFs or anything. Digital assets, the miners I haven't seen any of that show up.
Speaker 1:There's a lot about the traditional financial world that I am absolutely in the dark about. I have general broad stroke opinions about the traditional financial side, but is it inaccurate or accurate to say that a company like BlackRock and a company like Fisher Wealth Management are, at their core, a similar type of company, just different in size and maybe in lines of business, where BlackRock might have 10 lines of business and Fisher Wealth Management has five, for instance? Are they similar?
Speaker 2:So I would say they're not similar and I think of BlackRock as an asset manager.
Speaker 1:Okay, you know, they're managing portfolios of investments and that's separate or different than what Fisher does.
Speaker 2:We're a financial planning firm. So somebody comes into our office and they say we're interested in retiring. Can you kind of give us an idea of how much money we need to save, what our retirement may look like? What's our tax situation going to look like in retirement? How can we best plan for the future? How can we best plan for our children? How can we best plan for our children's future? Those are the things that we do. We don't manage portfolios of investments.
Speaker 3:So you're developing, or rather your firm is developing a long-term plan for the individual person married couple. What have you Then you take in consideration okay, I want to be able to have enough money to send my children to such and such school. I want to be able to have enough money to send my children to such and such school. Right, I want to be able to retire at 50, 55, right? Uh, hopefully 45 there. Uh, have my house paid off things of that nature there?
Speaker 3:So it sounds like, then, also that you also is going to have, I guess, life insurance absolutely part of your plan in your strategy there. And then you're going to meet with them on a yearly basis and say, ok, you know, this is what happened. We need to continue to do this, or we need to kind of modify the direction. You've been conservative, you might want to be a little bit more aggressive there. And then, of course, things take place health issues, what have you? Inability to work, covid, things can really change that whole strategy there. But again, you're looking at an individual long-term goal, and long-term plans is to get them there. That's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 1:So, if I came to you and said I want to work on retirement, I'm 38. Okay, and I want to work on retirement, would you be advising me and I'm going to throw just generic things out there but would you be advising me to buy things like ETFs Not necessarily Bitcoin ETFs, but ETFs and then helping me go through the process? Right? Would you tell me, hey, you need to go to BlackRock and BlackRock's going to just buy BlackRock's bundle of ETFs, or however they bundle assets, and I would just go off and do that, do you? I guess my question is when I come to you, you're going to advise me to buy certain assets to reach my goals. Right, do you help me buy those assets? Yes, so I don't go to a separate entity to buy those assets. I go through you.
Speaker 2:You could but typically people do that. 99% of the people would go through us to do that.
Speaker 1:So when it's time to check my returns or my status, I go to your website or I go to a program that you've given me to evaluate what I've got going on. That's exactly right. So it's all one portal through you guys, that's right, that's good, yeah, that's good yeah.
Speaker 3:How do you handle someone whose idea strategy is going to be completely opposite of what it needs to be? Reed, I want to go to Las Vegas. Danville just opened, so I'm going over there and take my future in my hands here, Whereas you're saying no, no, no, no, you need to do this, this, this. How do you handle situations like that? And I'm thinking you probably ran into somebody that's been that extreme from one end to the other.
Speaker 2:So that does happen. I would say it doesn't happen as much as you probably think. Most of the people that we deal with are savers. Why would you go to the building?
Speaker 1:if you weren't, you just wouldn't think about stopping by.
Speaker 2:Right, you bring up an interesting point. We deal with savers, but at some point everybody passes on, gets their angel wings and then we get to deal with their kids. Passes on, gets their angel wings, and then we get to deal with their kids, you know, and so that's a whole nother ballgame sometimes, you know. So there are cases where people you know want to do things with their money that we may not agree with, and you know, at the end of the day it's their money. We're just there to help. I'm never gonna. I mean it happens and you just give them the best advice possible. I remind them that I've been doing this since 97. We've been through some good times and bad times. I've seen all kinds of different transactions, you know, been involved, you know, at a brokerage firm, seen transactions at a bank, seen all kinds of different thingsped a lot of people through their retirement, and so you know, we can only try so hard. People are going to do with it whatever they want. If they need their money, we're going to give it to them.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like the refund money yeah, Sometimes you're going to take it pay off bills Yep. Sometimes you're going, hey, Danville just opened, so here I come yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know I mean, at the end of the day, we can't tell them what to do with their money.
Speaker 3:We're just going to give them advice, you know Do you see the people you deal with, your clients, being more disciplined with their money or less disciplined from when you first started.
Speaker 2:So the people that I deal with now, I would say, are pretty disciplined and they're savers and they're interested in planning for certain financial objectives mostly it's retirement and so I would say you know, for the most part the people that I deal with, a majority of the people that I deal with, are close to retirement or already retired, and so you know it's.
Speaker 3:They've gone through the pitfalls of it's here today, it's gone tonight, so they're not going to be too crazy. And I noticed on my end on the tax preparation the younger crowd, the 30-ish, they're less inclined to put aside money for whatever Once they get the refund money.
Speaker 2:Maybe a week, maybe two weeks, it's gone and you know, tom, that's a shame, because those are the people that have the time on their side. Right, they have the most opportunity to make money and it doesn't matter. This is not a podcast about investments. You have time on your side, and that's something that a lot of us don't have At 55, I don't have the same time frame.
Speaker 3:Oh no, oh no, as a 30-year-old, you know.
Speaker 3:And unfortunately, you know, people at 30 may not be interested in thinking about retirement. You know, that's what I noticed the children now is really very difficult to have that conversation. It's like, well, I don't want to hear that, I'm not going to worry about that, I'm going to live and let live right now. And it's very sad because so many people's situation financially is due to the fact they're uneducated about money. Yep, and they're undisciplined about money, right. The song I sing constantly is educate yourselfated about money. Yep, and they're undisciplined about money, right.
Speaker 3:The song I sing constantly is educate yourself about your money. Don't be a dummy with your money. Look around you and my 30-ish, 31, 32-year-old daughter lives with me and again, it's a song I sing to her constantly. You know, look, you're spending $40, $50 on makeup, cosmetic, what have you? And two weeks later you're out there spending another $40, $50 there. So again, I see individuals not being disciplined with their money and not having the ability to say no. My grandson I mentioned he's spending the summer with me. That's one of the things I'm working with.
Speaker 3:When you go into the store, have your list If it's four or five, six things, and then look, you know, just don't go in and grab something. But so many people don't have a list when they go to the grocery store. So many people go in there oh that looks good, it's on sale. It's not on your list, let's see. And also, when you get to the cash register, you want to have a pretty good idea as to what this is going to cost you, because you don't want to be standing in front of the cashier and say wait a minute, take that back, wait a minute. Who put that in there? Because again, you're not being smart and you're not being disciplined with your money and you don't have the ability to say no yeah, budgeting is hard thing to do oh god, and you're right I mean, where do you learn budgeting?
Speaker 2:where do you learn how to plan? Um, it's not taught in schools, or maybe it is now. It certainly wasn't when I was coming around. No, no, so um so and and you know we had this conversation before we started Everybody needs some advice, whether they get it from us or whether they get it from someone. One of the things that I liked about coming to work for Rick and Willie is we're there to help the community and so, regardless of minimums, we're there to help people.
Speaker 1:And there's something to be said about being like trying to be a part of the community, actively engaging with the community, because at the end of the day, if you tell me something that's false, you scam me. What have you? There's a face associated with the actions that occurred or the advice I received, and I can then return to that same person, or at least the same business, and say there's ramifications for this scammy treatment you gave me. But when you're in a community and you say, hey, we're here, here's our name, here's our sign, and you're in something like money, you're putting a lot of weight on your reputation. And your reputation only exists for most businesses within their community. Somebody like Wendy's I have no problem with Wendy's specifically, but somebody like Wendy's if they lost the Mebane location, they would not care in the long term. If Fisher Wealth Management all of a sudden had a bad name in the community of Mebane or Graham or Haw River or Burlington, that would matter a whole lot, right, everybody would be upset about that. And you mentioned that this isn't really being taught in schools.
Speaker 1:Regarding budgeting, I've been kind of dabbling of this theory about church. Where else in society do you routinely go? Where somebody says you better be good. You better not act wrong. You better love your neighbor. You better not, you know, covet your neighbor's wife or covet your neighbor's wife. You better not do these things because there's ramifications.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile you walk out into the regular world and the only thing you really see is you need more money, your car's not nice enough. You know this, that and the other. You don't get reminded anywhere else that I'm aware of in American culture on a routine basis. To be good, once you're over 18, once you're out of your parents' control Financially, we're absent. That same thing. There's no entity where, as part of the culture that you are reminded to be frugal with your money, that you're reminded that tomorrow's coming and today is leaving and that you should. I think hearing you two talk about it for some reason connected that back to church with me. It's a similar premise. There's no once you're over 18, 21,. What have you? There's no authority on morality or finances that you then subscribe to.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, unless you go to church or official wealth management.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting idea that you've got. I mean, I've never really thought of it that way, but I agree with you.
Speaker 3:And one of the things of course, as we all know with the technology, is the whole social media there and again. That's why I encounter again, especially with the younger generation, where I saw such and such on Facebook. When the stimulus money came out in 2020, 21, we was getting random calls hey, when am I going to get my next stimulus money? I don't know. Well, such and such posted on Facebook that there's another $400, there's another $1,200. I don't know, I don't know anything about it. So you've got this social media, tiktok, facebook. What have you there? That is putting this information out there from Joe Blow.
Speaker 3:And, of course, people are very gullible. So when they hear there's a free ticket here to go get a Wendy meal or more stimulus money, they don't even question it. They're like, okay, yeah. And the thing also that I see with the different social media they have no problem putting their name, social security number, their date of birth, and they don't realize what they have done is open up a door for their theft to be stolen. And of course, you probably run into it, reed dealing with people whose credit has gone downhill for whatever reason divorce, death, what have you and they don't realize that your credit is like your health. It's an investment and once you begin to go down that road of bad health, bad credit, you got to work to reestablish it. And time is not always on your side yeah, time is a.
Speaker 1:Time is a thing that you don't understand at all. Like I mean us in this room, I mean the general person. It's no concept of time, and what I mean by that is a dollar today does not equal a dollar tomorrow, or it might equal a dollar tomorrow, but inflation may adjust the value of that dollar. Your investment may adjust the value that you have invested with that dollar. There's so many factors when it comes to time and money that most people never, ever connect the dots on, and I think to a certain degree, that's somewhat on purpose, and I think to a certain degree, that's somewhat on purpose that there's an intentional absence of information like this being pushed, because if people understood I think Henry Ford said something similar to this If you actually understood how money worked, there'd be a riot in the streets, and Bitcoin is only opening the door for me to understand more about the financial world. Say, four years ago, you could have asked me anything you wanted to about finances and if you boiled it down to it to its core, my core response, my core response would be well, get more money. You know, just that's the answer. If you can't retire, we'll make more money. Go get more money, go work for more money.
Speaker 1:I didn't understand things like investing. I didn't understand inflation. I didn't understand all these factors that contribute to what might be considered a healthy or an unhealthy amount of savings in retirement. But when I got into Bitcoin, all of a sudden that whole perspective began to change and it became just about time, just about amassing assets, because once I understood how Bitcoin functioned and I then looked at the dollar, I thought the dollar functions almost exactly opposite of all the best ideals about Bitcoin. So if I invest in the dollar, my time horizon is going to change. When I want to utilize those funds is going to change, because I know if I wait till I'm 65, 85, however long I live, to either pass that money on or use it, the value of that money is not going to be the same as the value when I originally acquired it. Now, investment could give me more money, but on a dollar to dollar basis it might be less dependent upon inflation. Where Bitcoin is the opposite, the longer I wait, presumably the almost programmatically the better it becomes.
Speaker 1:For instance, we just went through the Bitcoin halving and I know you said you've got some background in blockchain. Well, the halving reduces my rewards by 50% when I mine Bitcoin, and that hurts in the short term, but in the long term, I know that the supply becoming less is good when demand increases or maintains and demand is increasing or maintaining, as we are seeing with people like BlackRock, but also there's other firms that are becoming involved, other asset managers and things of that nature, firms that are becoming involved, other asset managers and things of that nature. What I would like to see, though, is not Fisher Wealth Management say hey, we're going to start selling Bitcoin or something of that nature, but a nod hey, we can talk about Bitcoin now that we're seeing it adopted by nation states or by these larger institutions, not as a marketable product for, say, somebody that's at retirement or after retirement, but to now say let's talk to the 25 to 35 to 45-year-olds with this other bit of information, even if it was just educational, because most people won't come to me because I'm just a guy in a hat but, fisher Wealth Management, I want to be clear. I'm not saying that I'm asking you to do this. I'm saying it would be great to see somebody like Fisher come out and say we're going to learn about Bitcoin and we want you to learn about it with us and then follow the appropriate resources to learn about it, because, at the end of the day, the 25, 35, 45-year-olds are going to be in your seat or be in your office in 20 years and if it's me, I don't even want to talk Like stocks.
Speaker 1:I don't like them. There's too much uncertainty. I don't know how they do, but they do really well they do. They do In dollar terms absolutely Well.
Speaker 3:It goes back to what we mentioned earlier about being educated. Right Again, I'm going back down the road with my grandson. Uh, he's a big dollar general fan, so and the song that I sing to him look, since you like to do spend money there. And he you know everybody with the younger generation got the cash out. I said go ahead and buy you 10% or 20% of Dollar Journal stock there. And he had no idea as to how to look for the price online. So I showed him how to pull up the price and a couple of days ago it was I don't know $220-some there.
Speaker 3:And that's when it occurred to me that this younger generation, even when they get into college, younger generation, even when they get into college, they're not really being taught the whole concept about if you're going to spend your money at Food, lion or Duke Energy or what have you, you would want to share that to get some of your money back, but they don't see that. And the big thing that they do not understand is to pay your bills on time. Why are you going to pay half of your cell phone bill and it's still going to be there next week? And then you have added another two, three, four percent to your fee. So instead of $100 a month now you got $103, $104. So the concept of being educated about money is not being taught and you got a lot of parents that don't teach that.
Speaker 3:Um, and again, I'm very fortunate where, uh, I grew up, my parents? They came up during the depression, so they're very, very much in tune. No, no, no, no, you know that's that's, that's too much. No, we're not going to get there. And you see so many of these kids now and you probably again go back to the grocery store because that's the family gathering there, unless they're going to a rec game. And the child wants this and the parents is like, well, what do you want tonight? And I'm like, wait a minute, they're not paying for the groceries there, but I know part of that is to feed them, so they'd be happy and go to bed and everything there. It's short term. Yeah, it is, it's short term. And they're not teaching them the concept again of saying no and what's in your budget?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I know you said you came with a few things that you were bringing from Fisher that you wanted to talk about. One of them was tax and estate planning, a few things.
Speaker 2:So we've kind of talked about asset management. We don't manage portfolios of Bitcoin, or we're not. We're not allocating to the ETFs. The managers and some of the portfolios may have some exposure there. It would be almost impossible to figure out. You know across the firm how much that is. It'd be a very probably most likely a small percent. But if people did want to come into our office and talk, I would probably be one of the people they would talk to and, and like I said before, I think a small allocation to Bitcoin is probably okay for a more aggressive or growth-oriented investor. It's certainly not suitable for a retiree or somebody that's more conservative.
Speaker 3:This is on Social Security.
Speaker 2:No, I mean you know you got to be able and you know one thing about it is we've all seen it, you and I. On one of our first conversations we talked about the fact that you know the market has hours 930 to 4, right, bitcoin's hours are 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can trade on Christmas.
Speaker 2:Right and you could go to bed. You can trade on Christmas, right and you could go to bed, you told me. You said you can go to bed one night, wake up the next morning and be down 15%.
Speaker 1:Easily.
Speaker 2:We're down 10% this week, yeah, so it's got to be the right thing for the right person. So the other thing, two other things, that some information that I brought you know it's not just about growing your money that I brought you know, it's not just about growing your money. You know, when you, when you come into a firm like ours, you know, one of the things we're going to make sure that we do is title your account correctly. If Tom wants to make sure that his assets pass to his daughter, he adds his daughter on his account as a beneficiary. And it's hard to do that when you have a, when you have a wallet, a digital wallet, um, and so, um, so the estate planning part of digital assets can get a little crazy.
Speaker 2:You know, um, and, and you know we've, we've talked, uh, I think I think, on one of your podcasts, and I can't remember which one it was um, so, and I've, I've personally asked these questions, because I'm married, I have a wife and if I die, I want all my assets to go to her. Um, that's traditionally how it works, and I'm not just saying that because she's going to listen to this. You know, it's actually time. I promise you it's written down on a will you know, and I can take it to the bank, that's right.
Speaker 2:Um, but, but in the case of digital assets, it's hard to name a beneficiary, and so what do you do? I mean, if you download them into a cold wallet, do you leave the key for someone, an executor, to handle for you? I mean, that's certainly something that people need to consider titling the assets and making sure that they pass to the appropriate person. I have to think, from a financial planning standpoint, that if you know, for our listeners that are listening, that owns, you know, bitcoin or some digital assets, it's something that they should consider, you know, planning for.
Speaker 1:I recently learned about a project and I don't know much about it yet, but it's something I want to look into where you basically record a bunch of digital information it could be any digital information you want to be pictures will Bitcoin wallet, it could be any digital content Facebook, your Facebook account, something like that and you check in, you submit the information that you want to have passed on to a relative or a friend or whoever after death.
Speaker 1:You then submit to check-ins periodically where if you don't check in March 1st of 2025, then programmatically this information will be released to the address you specified. That may not work financially in the eyes of things like the IRS or in the financial world or the traditional financial world, but in theory I could put a Bitcoin wallet on there and say look, if I don't come back by 2025, march 1st, send my wife a copy, or send whoever a copy of my Bitcoin passphrase with instructions on how to access it. No third party will or anything necessarily required. If people don't like say no one knows that I have it, for instance, then I wouldn't necessarily need to transfer it through a will or through any other process to somebody like my wife. Just here's the password. Good luck. I'm out, yeah, whereas if I have a substantial amount and I need to transfer it down through will, I don't know exactly how you would do it outside of just giving someone the password, but then you have to trust the person that you give the password to.
Speaker 2:And that's where I thought it would be interesting for us to just talk about it, because it's going to happen to all of us and for for people that own digital assets. How do you do that? And I think the key is you just plan for it. Your planning for it may look different from mine, it may look different from Tom's Absolutely, and so I've heard, I read an article recently about how Ethereum, using smart contracts, would do similar to what you just said. If, the if and then if and then statements, if, if something happens, then this happens Absolutely. You know that that may be the answer.
Speaker 1:It may be, it takes a lot of complexity out, Right Cause you're out. You only have to answer a single question Yep, did you check in? And, in the case of my example, did you check in on March 1st? If the answer is no, I'm sure there's some safeguards in there in case you oversleep on March 1st or something. But if the answer is no, then this is sent to a place, and the same would be for Ethereum.
Speaker 1:Programmatically, you can build a system inside of another existing system that says when this occurs or doesn't occur, whichever, this other action is going to take place. I actually think it makes it a little simpler than traditional markets, because the transfer of ownership is immediate and basically concrete. Whoever has a password owns that Bitcoin. Maybe not legally, but structurally realistically, they own that Bitcoin. And then the other side is it eliminates the requirements for complexities and things like wills. I don't need to say if, then this, that I can just say if, if and this or if and that.
Speaker 1:If I'm gone and my wife is still here, then she gets that, whereas a will might say if I'm gone, then these assets go to this person. These assets go to this person. This person doesn't get anything. And if this person does XYZ, everybody's removed. You know, like some weirdness, and you always hear about these legal battles in terms of when somebody dies, what happens to their assets. That's kind of why I like or at least one of the reasons why I like Bitcoin is because I understand it. It makes it very easy for me to kind of mentally work through these things. I hope I'm not anywhere near a point where I need to worry about it, but I do need to start long-term thinking and planning ahead. In that regard, it needs to be on my radar, something I put together. That's exactly right.
Speaker 3:Do you do that in part of your plan? Hey, you need to look at if you're going to go down the route here of some kind of digital currency. You do have safety vials in place.
Speaker 2:If somebody approached me and told me that they had digital assets, I would definitely have this conversation with them, but you know, my journey has been pretty short. I just started this process, or journey a few years ago, and most of the people that I deal with are retirees, and they're they're. You know they're not allocating.
Speaker 2:So, but I think over time that'll change. People come in and and you know, the interesting thing is, there are probably people that we work with that have some um allocation to Bitcoin or Ethereum or or some digital asset that we just don't know about. Um, you know, we don't know what. We don't know about everybody's money, you know, we might think we do, but we don't.
Speaker 1:You know about some of their money, right At minimum.
Speaker 2:Right, and there are people that probably don't even know that I have, you know, gone through the certificate program, through the digital assets, through Rick Edelman's program, and I just I'm interested in it. But I would say majority of my clients are probably, you know, at a point where they're just it's just not an appropriate investment.
Speaker 3:Well, tell them to make sure they answer the question on the tax return. Yep, well, it's been out maybe two, three years, but of course this year, big bold letters. Yep, did you or did you not engage in any type of cryptocurrency exchange bartering? It's pretty much an IRS statement that is like a blanket. It's going to catch everything and anything there, and one of the things a lot of times people fail to realize is the wording on a tax return can be a federal charge, because at the very bottom when you sign it whether you sign it your signature or you sign it electronically under perjury- there and you know that was something that uh is hitting a lot of people now from the spillover from covid for the ppp money, the sba money, the economic disaster money, because if they had paid attention, every time they uh opened another, they hit the initial yes, I understand like a wheel.
Speaker 3:So of course, that's something that people want to be aware of, which goes back to the whole thing of risk. There's risk involved in everything that you do and of course, you want to be educated on the risk, because you don't want to be driving in the dark with no headlights.
Speaker 1:How do you, how does Fisher approach? Well, not Fisher. How do you approach the concept, the?
Speaker 2:thought the mechanisms of inflation in terms of how you advise people to invest. So you know the best what I would tell you. One of the best ways to beat inflation would be have an allocation towards stocks. Over time, we can talk about small company stocks, we can talk about large company stocks, but over time, over a long period of time, you're going to get that 8% to 10% return off. Stocks's certainly beat inflation over a long period of time, and so inflation is important. We're seeing a lot of inflation now. It's starting to come down. For years it hasn't been an issue, but it is something that erodes the dollar, as we were talking about earlier and it's something that people should be concerned about.
Speaker 2:Why does it exist? Concerned about why does it exist? Well, I just think it's probably part of, you know, part of things become more expensive, um, you know, over time. I mean, I think that's just part of, uh, part of capitalism, um the capital.
Speaker 1:But technology drives down the price of goods and services right to, relatively speaking. If you, if inflation didn't exist, everything should get cheaper. Because we get better at manufacturing it. We get, you know. We find better sources of material, we find better capital markets for financing, we find better labor markets for employees, like if if capitalism worked in a pure bubble. But because it doesn't work in a pure bubble, something introduces inflation. I know what introduces inflation. I think we all do right, the Federal Reserve introduces inflation mathematically.
Speaker 1:The question I've always had is why? Why does that need to occur in order for an economy to function properly? Because if my money, that the value of my money, did not fluctuate, if a dollar always represented, if we went back to, because if my money, that the value of my money, did not fluctuate, if a dollar always represented where you know whatever, like if we went back to, say, pre 1932, and you and you have $1 represents $1, $1 of value in the system, I don't know why we'd had to change the way that value goes over time or the, the the denomination of that value over time. One candy bar in 1930 was, let's say, a dime. Why does one candy bar now cost a dollar to two dollars. What caused that to occur?
Speaker 3:and the only thing I can think of that, and the only real answer I've gotten from anybody, is because well, right now in, it's a spillover from COVID, I think in 2021, 40% of the money in circulation came about since COVID. So what you've got is that basic economic model that never changed the more supply of money that's out there. If, when the supply goes up of money and the demand stays the same, the only thing that can happen is price goes up but why does supply, why does the supply of money need?
Speaker 1:why is two percent a target? Why don't you just, why can't we turn off the money printer just just like you? Like you turn off a leaky faucet, turn off the money printer, the.
Speaker 3:Federal Reserve decided, in their unlimited knowledge, that 2% is what it should be to have a true economic growth Going back to the 2020,. What took place is, of course, during the Trump administration. The sky's falling. Get the money out there. Get the money out there. $1,200, $600, ppp money. The sky's falling. Get the money out there. Get the money out there. Twelve hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, ppp money. And I was like, wait a minute, this money is not real money. It's not coming from being productive. It's coming from the Federal Reserve, and so you think about it, trey.
Speaker 1:People are waking up the next morning looking at their phone. I just got twelve hundred dollars. But that's a, that's a short term cause of inflation. Yeah, yeah, but but they, they institutionally believe that two percent is is the it's supposed to work so, but why?
Speaker 3:they just put we don't know we don't know right, they just pull it out.
Speaker 3:And what you said is true when you look at in, in theory, your whole productivity. When things become more productive, then the price should go down and of course the song I sing is you want your buying power to increase. Of course you know so much about minimum wage, minimum wage. And look at California. They got a $20 minimum wages and the fast foods are shutting down. Restaurants are leaving because they cannot sustain that $20 an hour, but the powers that be has convinced the politicians to vote. You need to do $20 an hour. Well, what good is going $20 an hour? And I go from 30 hours to five hours and so that 2%. And again, from what I read, they've just created it there. But what it does is it drives up the price of everything across the board.
Speaker 3:And I remember back in the 70s, 72, 73, when the gasoline shortage took place, my mother she was driving a Volkswagen Beetle there and you were buying gas on even days and odd days. And you were buying gas on even days and odd days and you went from 25 cents a gallon To 50 cents and people just freaked out. We had 50 cents a gallon there. Everybody would be happy there. But when you go back and you look, and it was a spillover From during the Johnson administration, the Johnson administration was going to fight the Vietnam War and was going to fight poverty, vietnam war and was going to fight poverty, all at the same time. Well, where did the money come from? The federal reserve?
Speaker 1:I understand that type of inflation, like to solve a momentary problem, yeah, and although it might not solve the problem, I understand why you attempted to do it, why why you thought you could do this. What I don't understand is the the, the requirement for it to exist outside of times like that, and there has to be something else. There has to be another mechanism that's causing these gears to turn this way. I think it gets lost these gears. I think that the message, the reason behind a lot of this gets lost in the traditional financial world because there's so much gray Like I can't go, just like you said earlier, you might not know all the money that a person is working with right, because they might have other accounts, other investments elsewhere and I'm not saying necessarily that everybody should, but you, in principle, me, you, anybody else cannot see the inner workings of banking systems, of financial transfers, of any of that, so we don't actually know what goes on behind the scenes. One thing I was thinking about leading up to this podcast was all the things that I get to know about Bitcoin simply because I know they don't happen. I don't need evidence that they do happen, because I know mechanically they don't, whereas in the traditional financial world it's the opposite. I get to know a lot about what's happening for me, but I don't get to know anything about, mechanically, how any of this works beyond me. An example would be if I want to send money to you in the Bitcoin world, you give me an address. I can see everything that's in that address. So if you give me your address and it's say you have all of your Bitcoin stored in one address, I can see your entire Bitcoin collection. I can't touch it, I can't do anything to it. I can deposit to it, but I can't withdraw from it. I can't alter it. The opposite is kind of the example for the traditional financial world. If I want to send you money on Cash App, I get to know who you are, but that's it. I don't get to know how much money you have and not necessarily that I should. But the mechanisms that allow that transfer to occur are hidden in the traditional system and the mechanisms that allow you to see that in the Bitcoin world are for everyone to see what you don't necessarily know who everyone is. So it's a different version of trust. I don't know who you are, but I know that this mechanism will keep me safe and I can watch it. I can watch my money go from you or from me to you or vice versa, and the other system I can't.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of stock, the way this kind of relates to is I could wake up tomorrow morning and Bitcoin be down 20%. In previous bull markets we've seen 80% drawdowns, life-changing drawdowns. People would jump out of the window on Wall Street if we went down 80%. Oh yeah, but I don't necessarily know why Bitcoin went down or up, but I know why it didn't. I know it didn't go down because the CEO did something stupid. I know it didn't go down because of insider trading yesterday at some other company before a product was released. I know it didn't go down or up because of XYZ.
Speaker 1:That does happen when I'm talking about a stock market or a stock for a company. If Steve Jobs had never said I'm going to come back to Apple, we wouldn't have Apple. I couldn't know that Steve Jobs was going to come back to Apple before he came back to Apple. So I couldn't make an investment based on knowledge that I didn't have. And then, when the stock goes up because Steve Jobs is back or because they released the iPhone for the first time. What have you if I didn't know about that beforehand?
Speaker 1:I only get to watch the results. I don't get to know all these things about all these companies and there's too many companies for me to worry about Whereas in the Bitcoin world you get Bitcoins produced every 10 minutes on average. That never changes on average. There is no CEO for me to worry about. There's no new plugs being put into the system that are going to change the way it acts.
Speaker 1:All I have to understand is supply, demand and security. That's the three things I have to understand to try to gauge if Bitcoin is okay. If security is still well-rounded, with plenty of miners and plenty of nodes, I don't need to worry about security. Supply is still limited to 21 million. I don't need to worry about that, about that. Demand is the only question, and we consistently see indicators for demand, so I kind of get a indication of how demand is going. It's very similar to the, the growth curve of the internet, whereas today I have a bitcoin. You know outlook well. In 1998 not many people had an internet outlook, but now everyone I mean just take somebody's phone for an hour and watch what happens. They start wigging out. Everybody's got an internet outlook.
Speaker 1:It's because of those unknowns in the traditional world where I feel I can't make the right decision because I will never have enough information. I don't know if the information that I have is accurate and in large part, when I was in that time in my life where I might would have invested in stocks, I didn't have somebody like you. If I see Fisher Wealth Management on the side, I'm going to make assumptions. If I was 19 years old, I'm going to make assumptions that that's for rich people, that has to do with the stock market, and I don't have enough money to even play that game Just not even I look at the Bitcoin world and I see the exact opposite. That's for everybody. That's understandable and digestible, because I've bridged that technical gap and I'm of the right age. I'm in my 30s, obviously, so I've got, hopefully, some time ahead of me. I say all this, though I don't want to make it seem like I'm against stocks, right? Just I don't want to make it seem like I'm against stocks.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:My risk tolerance is based on knowledge instead of potential or failure. I believe Bitcoin has long-term potential, but it may end up failing and if it does, I made an investment that was based off of the best knowledge I could possibly gather at the time, instead of a prediction over a product or a change in the future.
Speaker 3:Well, the thing, too is about the whole concept of money. We don't understand what money is because no one has defined money. The whole thing about the dollar bill is that that dollar is easy to fold up and put in your pocket. Nobody looks at the dollars, nobody looks to see that it says a note that's good for any tender or transaction there, but in their mind it's going to be the answer to all my problems. Now I realize and again, it's just a note there that's created, in this case by the United States government to give you a self-assurance.
Speaker 3:And the thing about the Bitcoin is it goes back to those old principles of supply and demand, because we know it's a limited supply out there, and then, as more people use it, of course, with that limited supply is that man goes up. The price has to go up. It's going to protect, as I tell people, it's going to protect my labor. I get paid $100 for doing a tax return today. I wake up tomorrow that $100 is gone down to $99, $98, depending upon what has taken place, and there's so many variables that can affect, in our case, united States currency. There I mean just like if you've been following the whole thing with the petrodollar. Well, now that they're making the modifications on that, it's going to be less of a demand for the petrodollars there.
Speaker 3:And of course, china's been dumping the US security, like the world may be coming to an end. So again they're getting rid of US security and people are going to have to look okay, what is money? And again, growing up on a on a farm in the country, um, if I got a bushel of beans and you got a pig, all of a sudden that bushel of beans and pigs is now become money because of what you need and what I needed there. But of course we don't have that now and that's what the public's got to learn is what is money? And because true money is going to gain value, not lose value, and unfortunately that's what's happening with the US currency right now.
Speaker 2:You know. I'd also like to mention, you know, stocks over time. I don't need to tell you this, you know they've been part of people's families.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And people have grown up. You know listening to their parents talk about stocks. People have collected dividends off stocks that have helped supplement their income in retirement and over a long period of time, it really changed, um, how a lot of americans have lived. Um, it's uh, you know stocks over time have made a lot of people wealthy and um, you know so. And and you know when we think about you know when they first started trading stocks. You know a long, long time ago. You know bitcoin's still a relatively new investment. You know a long, long time ago. You know Bitcoin is still a relatively new investment. You know when you think about it.
Speaker 2:It's only 15, 14, 15 years old, right, and so you know it's going to be hard, especially, you know, when we hear about the things that have happened. You know whether it was Mt Gox or FTX or Terra Luna or whatever it was there. Just there hasn't been a lot of good news. You know there's good news when we look at what the value has done over the last few years.
Speaker 1:But like a lot of things when you hear about them in the press. There's not a lot of good news out there. I think you have to. This is where a place the public generally gets confused is they conflate crypto with Bitcoin. Terraluna, crypto, Mt Gox, stolen Bitcoin, Right, A variety of these things that you hear about on the news are related to crypto tangentially, but not Bitcoin specifically. That's correct. I'll flat out say for my own personal opinion I don't buy anything that isn't Bitcoin. I don't care what it's going to do, I don't care how fast it is. I don't care how many transactions per second it can do. I don't care what it's going to do. I don't care how fast it is. I don't care how many transactions per second it can do. I don't care. Yeah, Because there's only one name in the game for me and that's Bitcoin. But in terms of bad news, the news is bad collectively. The world is on fire. Inflation is through the roof. Although everyone says on the news that it's actually okay, it's not, it's improving.
Speaker 3:Yeah it's not.
Speaker 1:People are hurting and when I look around this dumpster fire of the world that we live in these days, between all the wars and all the stuff that's going on, it's like things aren't getting better in my life so far. Right In my lifespan I've born in 86, I came up through the glory days of the late 80s and the 90s, which to me, I think, were a pretty good time, but since then, like since 9-11 that's kind of my earliest memory of things something being wrong was 9-11. Since then, things really haven't gotten better. I look at bitcoin as like a beacon of hope, like this is something that is getting better with time and it's doing it mathematically. And then I look at the other side and say, well, there is a bunch of bad press, but there's bad press about everything. They're lying to you. Like I don't think BlackRock is sitting around going. We're sitting on a couple billion dollars worth of Bitcoin right now and I don't know, somebody just got hacked, so we should get rid of it. It's not what they're doing. They're accumulating at a record pace. And why are these big entities doing this? It's because trusting in other things is beginning to fail.
Speaker 1:Right, warren Buffett said the best investment he could have ever made was his first investment. If he had just made his first investment and never changed, just never. Just didn't pay attention to the headlines, didn't do anything, just bought stock when he was 13 years old and done nothing else, right, just keep buying stocks from there on out. And he ran the numbers with something like a hundred dollars invested at his earliest investing age was millions and millions of dollars by the time he would have retired. So you can't accumulate that all works. But think about all the bad news that came between the time Warren Buffett could invest and the time that he could say, retire from his investments. Bitcoin's going to have a lot of bad news. It's going to continue to have a lot of bad news because it's young's going to continue to have a lot of bad news because it's young. People are going to get confused and do wrong things or and people are going to get taken advantage of.
Speaker 1:To the, the and I. I'm not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the media collectively isn't telling you things are good when they actually are right. They tell you go to the grocery store and inflation's not that bad, it is in the, the real world. But then they tell you Bitcoin is terrible but it's actually good. So just look at the news and do the exact opposite of what they say. Unless you're going to have a 65-year horizon, then you can play with stocks a little bit easier because you have time to let that accumulation occur and you can just ride the S&P 500. You don't need to invest in individual stocks necessarily and just assume that you bet with America that America is going to do well over the long term. Whether or not that happens and the dollar maintains that's a whole other question. But you can't do that. But people need to be aware that the bad news that you're hearing about Bitcoin is the same bad news you're hearing about everything else, and most of it isn't as they're telling you.
Speaker 2:And you're, you're, you know, as far as the Mount Gox and the Terraluna, you know, those are just things that you know I was thinking about off the top of my head, there's been a ton of them there. But also there are politicians that are completely against it you know, and so that's not helping either.
Speaker 1:Good, you know, um, everything's good for bitcoin, so the more people that fight it good, yeah, because, um, the just us talking about it we're spreading the we're spreading. I'm not going to call it a virus, but it functions like a virus. Me and you have a discussion. The person listening to us may hate bitcoin and may think that it's the biggest scam on the market, but, but he's thinking about Bitcoin and he's going to hear it in the news and he's going to hear it at the bar Ten years from now. He's going to recognize that Bitcoin's a good thing and then he's going to buy in, just like everybody pretty much is. And when that occurs, it will be because me and you had this conversation. It'll be because somebody planted that bug and it just grew over time. There there isn't all the politicians that are against bitcoin. I look at them like I look at the federal reserve chairman. You're close enough to the money printer where you actually care if it stays on. You don't want it to turn off well, you have to understand too.
Speaker 3:You're going to have politicians who are going to be against it because they like the power that they have and the political contributions they get from the different lobbyists. You know, if people really understood in the United States how our political system works, the power that the lobbyists have and the influence that they are able to manipulate behind the scene. And the thing of it is, with the whole Bitcoin and that blockchain technology, it's going to take away that corruption.
Speaker 1:It takes away a lot of it.
Speaker 3:And see, and that's really when you get down to it, that's the biggest virus that capitalism have is the corruption. And when you look at the whole concept of Marxism and communism, and what have you? It's based on corruption, of somebody paying somebody off to get a special favor that they want. And that's why you have so many people that don't understand the whole concept of money. Because if you were to tell somebody, well you know, if a bank has $100, they can turn around and loan out what 90% of that. They don't understand that that $100, and that's part of the whole 2% that $100 has now generated another $90, and that $90 has now generated roughly another $80. And yet, at the end of the day, you have now generated $1,000. Well, no, it was only $100 to begin with there.
Speaker 1:Faction Reserve Banking. I think eventually banks will catch on to Bitcoin. There was recently a thing I forget exactly what it was called, but it was effectively allowing banks to custody Bitcoin. That was put forth in Congress, I believe, and Biden vetoed it.
Speaker 2:Yep, I think that was FIT21. Something like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:And why would Biden veto it when the banks want it? Well, the banks obviously want it, or at least the collection of banks that were involved in this decision-making process, because you're not going to get a gang of banks to get together and make a decision where they collectively want to do something unless they actually want to do it because they're competing against each other.
Speaker 2:I think they're starting to use blockchain to transfer assets. I know that there are mutual fund companies that are using blockchain to settle transactions. It works, so I think JP Morgan has exposure to blockchain. They've invested in it.
Speaker 1:That's a great example, JP Morgan, because Jamie Dimon will come out and be like Bitcoin's garbage. Meanwhile, he's got a whole legion of people working on Bitcoin. Totally, it's completely opposite of what they want you a whole legion of people working on. Bitcoin Totally. It's completely opposite of what they want you to hear or what they want you to believe.
Speaker 2:But I think the banks are definitely involved with it. Mutual funds are becoming more involved. Fidelity, franklin Templeton you've probably heard of those companies have some exposure. So I think it's becoming more and more part of traditional finance.
Speaker 1:Do you think Fisher as a company will at some point take a look at?
Speaker 2:it. So again, we're just financial planners and so we don't pick and choose necessarily what goes inside of a portfolio when a manager, when we hire a manager, no.
Speaker 1:I mean for their own asset to maintain, because I'm speaking broadly and from an uneducated standpoint about how this works internally. But I presume that as a company, the company has a balance sheet and that balance sheet has a certain amount of money within it, that is, operational profit savings. However you divide it up, I imagine that amongst those divisions is investments, and amongst those investments could be an ETF, could be cold storage, bitcoin, could be XYZ. I mean, if you buy NVIDIA, you're probably going to do okay through the initial encroachment or onslaught of AI.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin sits in a similar position as NVIDIA does if you look at the past 10 years as far as how much it's gained and appreciation. So you have a comparison financially to say, if we had invested in NVIDIA as a treasury asset 10 years ago, we would have 20X'd our money or whatever NVIDIA has done. Same thing for Bitcoin. But you have to make the decision to walk outside of the traditional stock world, which may impact the perception of Fisher Wealth Management. It may have a microstrategy effect where other wealth management firms say we need to adopt this as a treasury asset because look how good Fisher is doing or how bad Fisher is doing, depending on how things go, but do you think that it that you're you.
Speaker 1:you're not necessarily looking at the budget of the company here no, I'm an employee of the firm but but do you think, like amongst the people there, that the conversation would ever occur to do something like that?
Speaker 2:you know. It would be like asking, um you know anybody in a small business. How is the owner gonna um allocate their funds?
Speaker 3:I mean I have idea.
Speaker 1:Maybe a little too close.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know that would be completely up to him. I mean, I've heard him say things, rick, that you know blockchain is going to change the world. I think there are a lot of people in our industry that feel that way it already has. I think there are a lot of people in our industry that feel that way it already has. How you take that information and allocate and act upon it.
Speaker 1:Yep, that's his business. One day we should ask Rick. We can get a hold of Rick and be like so yeah, what do?
Speaker 2:you think you got to buy up some.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin right, because I want to make. I truly would like to see, in the long term, alamance County and the pillars of the community from a business standpoint and a government standpoint become known to the Bitcoin world and vice versa, because the Bitcoin world only knows about certain cities. The Bitcoin world knows about um I forget what the name of the actual name of the place is, but they call it Bitcoin beach in El Salvador. We know about places like um, uh, like Austria, because of Austrian-related economics. We know about certain places because of their relationship to Bitcoin, but there's yet to be a town in North Carolina that's known for Bitcoin. I know some Bitcoiners here. There's some big ones, not necessarily in Alamance County, but in the area. There's some big Bitcoiners that have big voices in the Bitcoin world. They've been on stages, but they do it from a company standpoint or from a branding standpoint Specific to Bitcoin, whereas if the Bitcoin community knew, like the gun store that's in downtown Mebane, you can buy guns from them with Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:You might not necessarily want to. There's a variety of things that you need to consider, but you can. They're probably one of the only gun stores in America where you can do that If we get a coalition of businesses who say look in our own market, in our own way, we're pro-Bitcoin, then the Bitcoin world will then turn its attention to this market. It's a new source of customers, it's a new source of revenue and expands your markets into non-local markets. So I think everybody should at some point, especially if you look at MicroStrategy and how well that company's done since adopting a Bitcoin strategy. I think at some point every entity that I speak with I hope that they will adopt Bitcoin. If nothing else, just a little bit 1% to 2% allocation is not a bad idea for an aggressive investor.
Speaker 1:It does. It does 1% to 2% allocation for an aggressive investor yeah there you go. Might not be such a bad idea. Yeah, and I hope maybe the folks at Fisher. Well, we plant the bug right. We just hey, we're here, we're here to help, we're not bad guys.
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't think anybody would think that anyway. So you know, if we go back just a few short years, you know the IRS was interested in knowing about, you know, people that had Bitcoin. Um, it certainly wasn't showing up as the number one question on the 1040 right below your address you know it's the number one question on the
Speaker 2:front page and so, um, you know, for the people that think that it's going to go away or the government's going to shut it down, they probably wouldn't shut it down if it was the first question right under the address on the 1040. And so there's been this evolution, and when you read that question and you just talked about it a second ago it's a little confusing. And one of the things that I hear from Rick Edelman, the gentleman that I was referring to earlier, is that for people and this is not you, trey, but people that are interested in buying digital assets, they're going to need some advice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I was in a continuing ed class before COVID at 15, 16, 17, and it was an instructor and that was the first continuing ed class that I had that were, and she didn't talk that much about Bitcoin, talk more about cryptocurrency. And she was worked at a financial planning CPA firm in New Jersey and what she was dealing with was the parents who are clients. Who was coming in there saying, well, look, my son is down in the basement. I don't know what he's doing, but a Lamborghini just got dropped off last week. And this is those early stages when Bitcoin was going from what? $0.08 to $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, what have you there?
Speaker 3:So, as you said, it has slowly evolved and that's the thing that really just blows my mind when you look at it, the history of it. I mean, it's a roller coaster, but every time it goes down it goes up that much higher. So, of course, that's something that the IRS and different tax agencies is going to look at, because that's why they in business to collect the tax revenue, going back to the days of jesus and matthew there. You know that's why jesus was crucified not crucified but criticized. You know why you got this tax collector here with us, because that's their job is to collect taxes, to turn over to the government and hopefully we've got able-bodied leaders. That's going to be rational. But as we see, they don't. They just throw money, throw money, throw money, throw money, which to the government and hopefully we've got able-bodied leaders that's going to be rational. But as we see they don't. They just throw money, throw money, throw money, throw money, which gives more and more to the inflation there.
Speaker 3:So this whole thing of thinking that it's going to go away, I don't think it's going to go away. I don't see how it can go away because you're going to continue to have people to invest there. And then two people, people who are working. Again, they want to protect their labor, they want to protect what they have done. And how can you protect it when you're putting your money into some currency, whether it's the dollar, whether it's the Mexican peso, whatever it may be, and it goes from $1 tonight to 99 cents, to 98 cents to 97 cent. So that means that at the end of a year when you got 10% inflation, the value of your money has gone down. So you have lost that buying power there. And again, the IRS and the tax agencies the biggest problem they see that they have right now is having people who understand it there.
Speaker 3:And the whole thing about the wallet, which I think is going to create another situation when you start talking about a state, because if there's a wallet out there and nobody knows about the wallet, it could very well be millions and millions and millions of dollars that the tax agencies can't get to because nobody else can get to. But but again, it's going to be something that's going to be on the radar and, of course, finding someone who understand it and, in fact, that's been associated with trade. That's one of the things that I've been doing for the last year since COVID is just trying to throw myself in the deep end to find out more and more about it, because right now it is a capital asset. You buy it, you hold it, you sell it, so you got a capital gain, and if I get paid in Bitcoin, just like bartering, it's got to show up as income there.
Speaker 3:That's why that question is there on the tax return there to kind of trip you up and again, if you answer that incorrectly, and you audit it and the auditor finds a million dollars of Bitcoin and you have said no, you committed fraud.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a question. If to kind of come back to your point how this is evolving If, as a thought experiment, if there's only 21 million Bitcoin, a certain amount of Bitcoin have already been lost. We know that. So let's say there's 18 million Bitcoin that can be accessed. Of that 18 million, let's say that only 16 million exist in circulation. The rest hasn't been created yet. Right, it hasn't been mined yet.
Speaker 1:If it were to come to a point in time that all value for all things was then denominated in bitcoin and one bitcoin was one, what do we say? 16 million? If there's 16 million Bitcoins in circulation that are available or can be accessed, if one out of 16 million Bitcoins represents one out of 16 millionth of all value in the world. If that were to occur, how much trouble do you think you'd be in with the IRS or with the federal government or with any government entity, if you own one 16 millionth of all value in the world? Because history has shown us that if you have a lot of money and not a lot of power, somebody will come and take that money from you. Because they have a lot of power In terms of the IRS, the federal government, they will stop at nothing to eviscerate you, should that occur.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah. Because, once you break $50,000, your passport can be revoked.
Speaker 1:Wait. So if you earn more than $50,000, a year no in taxes. If you owe more than $50,000.
Speaker 3:And you don't have an arrangement and you leave the United States. When you try to come back, oh, stop Interesting. Yeah, this passport is no. Yeah, now, if you have an installment agreement and you're in good standing. But if you don't because I do a lot of non-files, delinquent taxes, what have you? I've had two clients during COVID. They couldn't get back in. Everybody's on the phone. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again you're going to pay your taxes there.
Speaker 1:Just a matter of how and when. Right, yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, I mean Al Capone.
Speaker 1:I wonder about that. So we sit here and we talk about Bitcoin today. If I'm right, right and bitcoin becomes the principal underpinning of the financial world, say and this could be 60 years from now at some point in my life, prior to the end, I may be one of the people who were talking about bitcoin before it became you know what. What I think it might be, and to to be at that point where, if it becomes something insanely valuable and people know that I was the one on the radio talking about it I was the one who's saying go buy it, do this Like it's a target. It's a target on my back for any, any entity listening.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, I feel like, if I feel like I'm fighting a war and I'm on the good side, then dying is part of part of that process and taking the risk of being attacked as part of that process. And I do feel like, to a certain extent, I'm not fighting a war against the traditional financial system. I'm fighting a war against a corrupt and unjust financial system. I'm fighting a war against a corrupt and unjust financial system. I think what you do is completely within the realm of good and just. You're taking people and giving them advice based on the existing infrastructure and existing systems to get them to a better place. So I'm not criticizing you or Fisher, but I criticize the system at large for what it's done to people over time. But yeah, I don't know, I love Bitcoin. Stocks are.
Speaker 2:We'll see, we'll get you, we'll get you on the stock trade.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you if we had another show. We had another guest and we felt like we needed some more financial horsepower, traditional financial knowledge Sure, would you be willing to come back and talk?
Speaker 2:with us, absolutely. You know it could be any subject, I still want to talk to Tom about the new 1099 DA that's going to come out in 2025. So it'll be that Maybe we'll wait for the next program.
Speaker 3:Let me get a continuing ed class on that. I tried not to get too in front there with the new forms.
Speaker 1:Do you know about it there?
Speaker 3:No, no, I knew you know, of course we deal with a lot of self-employed people, so we've been getting them to understand the difference between that old 1099 Michelinians and the new 1099 non-employee compensation. There it goes back to creating a tax system, because in the whole thing about that NEC that it creates a social security tax. So whereas you may not owe an income tax, you very well owe the 6.2 social security and the 1.45 Medicare and you're not going to get out of that.
Speaker 2:But I think this is a brand new point yeah. And this was part of the meeting that I went to. They were talking about rolling it out, and it'll be kind of interesting to see what happens, because when you think about it, most people don't just. Well, look, if you just own Bitcoin and you're holding it, you might not need a 1099, right?
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:But if you're staking ETH or if you're holding multiple digital assets and you're buying and selling you're getting airdrops or forks or whatever it is you're going to need some help.
Speaker 3:Which again tells us it's not going away, it's not what does the new form?
Speaker 2:consist of it's just a 1099, but it's a 1099DA digital asset Digital asset Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, a 1099, but it's a 1099. Da digital digital asset yep, okay, I'll show you when that, when we, when we finish up here. But, uh, tom, tell me what you think about this idea. Uh-oh, are you ready? Here we go, all right. So imagine, for those people that are interested in taking one or two percent and they put it in a roth ira, you know, and it grows tax deferred and they're custodians out there. I believe they're custodians and you, I believe there are custodians, and you can maybe buy the ETF and put that in a Roth IRA. But imagine if you could put, you know, bitcoin, eth, whatever it is in a tax-deferred account and let it grow tax-deferred and be able to pull it out tax-free one day. That's going to eliminate a lot of the problems that we were just talking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it really gives you protection against inflation, there.
Speaker 2:It's not for everybody, it's you know it's.
Speaker 1:You're taxed on the sale. If I buy Bitcoin today and sell it tomorrow, I'm taxed on the sale based on my profit, correct?
Speaker 3:The gain.
Speaker 1:Based on my gain A profit gain.
Speaker 2:A Roth IRA is pre-tax right, so you invest dollars into the account, you put dollars into the account and then you work to buy, like for example, the Bitcoin ETF, and leave it in there to grow tax deferred.
Speaker 1:So I'd put dollars into an account. Right, those accounts, those dollars would accumulate up until the point in which it could buy a share or some quantity of an etf or a stock that I wanted, or, in this case, an etf, let's just say the bitcoin etf. Okay, so we buy, it'll buy a one share of the uh, blackrock etf. Yeah, I think it's ibit. Okay, that's what they're called. Okay, so it'll buy one share of iBit. And then later on in life I would then liquidate that without paying taxes. That's correct in a Roth IRA. But if I'm using dollars in the traditional world, if I put dollars in, those dollars are going in pre-tax from a paycheck or from a deposit of some kind. Right For a Roth.
Speaker 2:IRA. So in a Roth IRA it's always after-tax.
Speaker 1:It's after-tax. Which one is pre-tax? Are there pre In a Roth IRA?
Speaker 2:it's always after tax. It's after tax. Which one is pre-tax? Is there a pre-tax one? So I think of a pre-tax as kind of a 401k, just a regular 401k, oh the traditional, the traditional IRA. You may get a tax break, a deduction, but the reason why I was mentioning it is if you could grow it tax-deferred and pull it out tax-free and if we think it's going to do what we think it's going to do and you just put a little bit of money in there. I mean, you know.
Speaker 3:It'll be a nice little payday. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting product and that would reward you for being disciplined and saving money Is nobody offering a service like this.
Speaker 2:So there are custodians out there. We're not one of them. I'll make that real clear that you can hold Bitcoin in an IRA with us. You cannot do that at LPL.
Speaker 3:Okay, I thought I have seen an article. I read internet reading, you know you read two or three sentences and then boom, you go to something else. But I was thinking I have seen something pop up on the telephone, or what have you about that?
Speaker 2:And I was like, hmm, this could be be pretty interesting there's some custodians out there that allow you to do that okay, so anyway, I just, you know, everybody look being a financial advisor, everybody wants a stock tip, you know yeah so we're not going to talk about stock tips today, right, I mean I can.
Speaker 1:But well, there's the big there's the big, was it the magnificent seven right stocks right now that are that are really driving the market upwards? Yeah, uh, nvidia apple meta is meta one of them.
Speaker 2:I think so I think that is one of them there's a few others.
Speaker 1:They're mainly technology companies google, uh, amazon, yep, they're the ones pushing the stock market up. You look at everybody else. They're kind of you know sideways action, maybe a little up, maybe a little down, but they're not doing what these other seven or eight companies are doing.
Speaker 1:So my stock tip would be one of the seven. If you're going to buy stocks, I would guess I mean realistically, knowing what I know about computers NVIDIA. It's going to be hard for a lot of other people to catch up with NVIDIA. When NVIDIA is this heavily invested in AI and producing hardware that's specific for AI, it's going to be hard to catch up with them because AI is going to accelerate their ability to produce and manufacture things for AI and because they're already in those relationships. They're already in bed with these companies that are producing AI, just like Tesla just bought some ungodly amount of hardware from Nvidia to invest in their AI or maybe it was X, it was X or Tesla, one of Elon's companies. So they're already there at the forefront of the market. And the other companies that can play in these markets just their name isn't in the Magnificent Seven. Their name isn't carried forward to the AI conversation because they're late or they just weren't as good. The other companies, like Meta Facebook, has kind of become the kids say that Facebook is for old people, so the kids aren't adopting that type of social media.
Speaker 1:They're adopting TikTok and fast social media If you get on Facebook. I don't have Facebook, but if you get on Facebook, it's basically just ads. You scroll and it's ad ad, ad. Oh, one of my friends. You scroll and it's ad ad ad. Oh, one of my friends ate a cake.
Speaker 1:Ad ad ad ad and you get on TikTok, it's video video. Video video ad.
Speaker 3:And it's entertaining, I must admit.
Speaker 1:It is entertaining. I catch myself on Twitter just scrolling, just scrolling, just looking at stuff, video after video, post after post. Um, and I'm I'm lucky in the fact that I was able to break myself away from Facebook four or five years ago. I don't even think about Facebook now as like a platform other than just general conversation. The only thing I pay attention to is X.
Speaker 1:There, you go Because X is I get immediate. I is x there. You go because x is I get immediate. I get immediate content that's relative to my interest and to the current time. So if I want to know what's going on bitcoin's price, I go to x, because x is going to tell me a lot faster than any news headline. Generally speaking, news just isn't fast enough, but I I want to thank you yeah for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Um good to finally meet you, tom absolutely, we've talked on the phone before Right, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask everybody who comes on the show signs our little Bitcoin canvas over here where season one this will be all the guests that we have in show or in-house that will come on and give us a signature. So if you're willing to do that, we would love it Absolutely. We're going to auction it off at the end of 21 episodes. Great, if, if a person bids on it and they win the bid, I will donate the proceeds to the Bitcoin core developer group.
Speaker 1:Oh okay, if, if nobody bids on it, I'll I'll put in a donation to the Bitcoin developer groups and it'll just go on my wall. So, no matter what happens, you'll be a part of this podcast history, as well as Bitcoin's history, for the foreseeable future, at least in one home.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'd love to have you sign it and I'd love to have you I don't know whether you would be able to, you know, read my handwriting.
Speaker 2:That's okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Ed Priola signed it up there. He was a or is. Oh, I see, yeah. Yeah, his signature looks like um e with scribble yeah. So if you don't know who he is, then you'll have to try to decipher that one some at some point later I need to get some handwriting lessons from tom jones whoever that guy is yeah, I don't know, you know good luck and when we have other guests on, um, you know, given an appropriate uh topic, like our next guest or not our next guest.
Speaker 1:But one of the other people we're talking to is interested in a drug called kratom. It's a legal drug that he feels enhances a variety of things. So maybe not for the kratom episode just because it's not in context, but future episodes, if we have some people come on that have a deep financial knowledge or we need to explain something that I just simply don't understand, or or taxman doesn't know, uh, maybe we'll bring you on if you're interested.
Speaker 2:You, you, just let me know. Awesome, awesome I figured out, um, you know how to, how to do this through compliance, and uh, it's a fairly easy process and, uh, we'll have to maybe give them a copy of it. Of course it'll be online for them to for them to listen to.
Speaker 1:I'll probably have it up in a day or so yeah, day, day and a half, but I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:I'd like thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'd also like to thank fisher for being willing to, you know, pass my email around till I got to the right person, yep, and not just throw it in the garbage because it said bitcoin so that was jessica.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could thank your buddy jessica next time you go to a football game yeah, yeah, yeah, I reached out to Jessica because I saw her.
Speaker 1:I went to Fisher Wealth Management's website and was like who is the most like, who's the person I can email that is most likely to respond based on the information I can gather from your site. And so I'm scrolling through all the people that work there and Jessica shows up and I was like wait.
Speaker 2:I know her.
Speaker 1:That's the girl that is at the football games with my son, I think her son plays football. And so I reached out to Jessica and she's like, yeah, just send me the email and I'll forward it on. But I figured that once it got past Jessica, amongst your colleagues and the people that you work for Bitcoin, like no, we're just going to put that in the trash. But you guys didn't. You guys responded. I think I heard from you just a few days later, if that Yep. So kudos to Fisher Wealth Management and you for maintaining an open mind and being willing to come talk to some scraggly guy and his well-respected community friend.
Speaker 2:Hey well, it was a pleasure, I enjoyed it. I hope I get another invitation.
Speaker 3:You will Absolutely Yep, yep, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think we had a good time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome, well, thanks everybody. Readreidbolinger B-O-L-I-N-G-E-R at lplcom. Cool. So for all of your traditional finance needs investment planning, things like that reach out to Reed. Let's get the Bitcoin community into Reed's inbox and let's get the regular people who just need help with traditional finances in the same place. Tom the tax man, jones, once again, how can people find you?
Speaker 3:Tom Jones taxescom.
Speaker 1:There we go, there we go and, as always, where the Bitcoin is, dead, podcast. So if you need anything, find us on Twitter or X, youtube, spotify all the places that you typically find podcasts and all of our contact information should be right there. But I'd like to thank everybody for listening in and thank you both for attending.
