How to Start Investing in Bitcoin & Crypto: Everything You Need to Know! Step-by-Step Guide

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that you need to know to making forum decisions going forward. So, like we said, whenever I tell you what to invest in, we're gonna give you all the information that you can make an intelligence intelligent decision. And tonight is one of those ones where intelligence will be displayed at a high level.

what's e ETF and uh, Investorpedia has all answers. And we connected with with Caleb and then we did an episode and then we had him on Market Mondays, and we had them in London and we did invest Fast Europe. Then we had him at invest Fest a few times. So, I mean, he's done so many different things as far as in person events and then also it's just been

a great resource. He's been able to connect us with a lot of great people, a lot of you know, high regard people you know, come through his uh, his network. So he's he's been somebody that we've definitely you know, utilized him as a resource and appreciate him for sure.

So when we wanted to have this conversation. I wanted to just keep it very neutral and I want to have you know, a sway towards one coin or try to get people to invest like we really this is purely for informational purposes only we're not trying to actually, you know, pump a meme coin. We're not trying to sell you anything. We're just trying to give you some information. So he was the perfect person because you know that's right up his alley. So here he is here, he is.

Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.

am really good at trying to understand it. Because I want to be an educated investor no matter what I do, and this is an area where we all need more and more education because the hype machine is in full effect. You say, you're not here to pump coins. They don't need your help. Those coins are being plenty on their own, plenty of hot air under this market. But there's a

lot to learn and a lot to understand. So I appreciate you sharing the platform and letting me bring some some of the resources that I've used at investi Pedia in other places to get a better understanding of this myself, because I'm an investor in the space, but I am by no means an expert. But I do think I have a general understanding of it. I'm excited to share it with your audience. Thank you.

didn't understand it. He's like, why would you pay five thousand dollars for something that's not even real, like five thousand dollars five thousand dollars for bitcoin, Like that's that doesn't even doesn't even make any sense, Like you can't even comprehend.

Come on, come all. If you search something up on the internet, like any of these terms, bitcoin, blockchain, proof of workproof of stake, you're going to see our results near the top because we've been doing this for a minute. So we are delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to represent as the editor in chief. I've been a business journalist for thirty years, so i am not, as I said, a crypto expert, a trading expert. What I am good at is learning these ecosystems and then sharing

that information. So if you like what you hear, if you want to hear more, follow us on invested Pedia, follow me if you want. I do a lot of this stuff, a lot of the front facing social education stuff for investor Pedia, and I'm on TV and on the radio, and I've been privileged to be on your stage a few times as well, So let's get after it everything and are most of the things I'm going to talk about today I got from our guides on bitcoin and cryptocurrency at investi Pedia, but I also grab

some resources from some other places. So if you're very new to this for the first time and I'm talking too fast or I'm saying things that go over your head, hey throw it in the chat and say what does that mean? B Scan this code so you have it so you can look at our guide. It's pretty robust on all things crypto, but especially bitcoin, which is sort of the king of the coins in the cryptocurrency patch, so to speak. So scan that, scan it now, scan it later. But this is all free and easy stuff

to digest. If I go through something that you don't understand, so I recommend you do that. Let's talk about bitcoin itself again, the king of the coins, and guys interrupt me as you see fit. But this is a cryptocurrency, virtual money. Some people call it digital gold. But it was created about fourteen years ago to be outside the control of anyone person or group, so banks and governments aren't needed to produce it, to regulated or oversee it.

And think about when it was formed and the ashes of the Great Financial Crisis right Occupy Wall Street was happening at the time. There was a lot of backlash against banks too big to fail, a system that was broken based upon mortgages that shouldn't have been carved up and sold. Right, There was this lack of trust in the financial system. So bitcoin was born out of that, along with a lot of other technologies, but this was

the big one again when it was born. It was born as a as a digital currency, but it was really a software program and a problem solved by a mysterious figure. Whether this person is an actual person, a group of people, a consortium, a man, a woman, an alien, we have no idea, but they go by the name of Sutashi Nakamoto, right, the creator of the bitcoin currency, who basically created this idea for this digital currency. Through this white paper and scan the code if you want

to geek out and read it. It gets very dense, very fast. But they they created it for a reason, to create this currency that lived on a blockchain, a digital ledger, away from government oversight, away from the big bad banking institutions. So if you really want to get into it, you can read about Sutoshi, or you can read the white paper itself. I've only made it through a few pages and it really knocks me out because

I'm just not that smart. But people that love to geek out on computer programming really are into the white paper and it makes a lot of sense for them. But he created this idea for bitcoin to be this coin, this currency that traded on the blockchain. You've probably heard this name a lot, the blockchain. What is the blockchain? Well,

the blockchain is like a digital ledger. If you think about you know, if you yet ran a small business years ago, or you had parents that did it, and they had the accounting sheet, the assets and liabilities, and every transaction was recorded on a real ledger, on a real piece of paper. This is a digital ledger, but it's wide open to everybody, so all records are transparent and it's impossible to alter. The blockchain. It is a digital record of transactions, of work, of insurance. It's used

in a lot of different ways right now. And if you think about the way cryptocurrencies in the blockchain are related, think of the blockchain like the highway right right, the highways built out there for all of us to get around, and then the cryptocurrencies and the tokens are the vehicles on that highway. So this is the underlying structure of

all of these cryptocurrencies. They're on this open blockchain where we can see everything, and you're going to hear a lot if you haven't already about centralized versus decentralized versus distributed networks. This is only important so you get it conceptually. But when you think about a centralized network, think about like our banking system. Right, there's your bank, could be city bank, could be chased, could be any bank of America, right,

but all banks are part of banking networks. Right. There may be individual retail banks or chains of banks. But in the middle of it all is the central bank, right, the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States, and then our twelve regional central banks, and then all banks have to work within their net, within their rules. Right, So that's a centralized network right

in the middle. You got the big circle in the middle, like a solar system and all the things running around it. Our solar system is a centralized network if you think of it that way. A decentralized network is what blockchain is right. This is where it's open to everybody. Everybody

can see what's going on. There is no one person or thing or entity and control of a decentralized network, and that is the promise of the blockchain and ultimately all the cryptocurrencies that are trading on it, that live on it, or that are programmed into the software of it. And then there's distributed networks. Think like your cell phone company, right, their cell phone towers and their cell phone companies everywhere,

but they're distributed all over the place. So you have your Sprint tower over here, and you have your AT and T tower over here. That's a distributed network. But for the purposes of understanding cryptocurrency and the blockchain, it's really a decentralized network that you have to get your mind around. Super important to understand what that is. So guys, interrupted any time, but just so we can get through some of these basis, because we're going to refer to

some of these words. Where's the blockchain being used today in twenty twenty four and really for the past five or six years. Well, one of the big reasons that bitcoin was created and the blockchain became such a big thing, especially in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis was the ability to transfer money to people, either the unbanked or the people that did not trust banks anymore that wanted to just transfer funds. Right now, globally there's money

being transferred from one country to another. People here are transferred back home to where their families are. Money transfer has been a huge business, but you think about the fees and the friction in a money transfer. If you're transferring one hundred bucks, you know, to you know you're at in Jamaica, You're probably going to pay fifteen bucks on that for a money transfer fee, and there's multiple

layers or friction that it has to go through. So the blockchain is used to sort of eliminate that, and you can transfer bitcoin without paying a fee. Smart contracts that's where the blockchains being used as well. Think about insurance or real estate. How many, you know, stacks of papers do we sign and fill out? And how many files are there for one real estate transaction there are hundreds of them. If you've ever bought a house or a piece of property, you'll sign your name fifty or

sixty times and the PaperWorks all over the place. A smart contract is on the blockchain. Everybody can see it. They open it up like a digital file, Internet of things very similar. You know, refrigerator knows when you're out of milk, it's already placing the order for you.

I think of it like a highway. It's already out there and it's been out there for a number of years. And I mentioned the fact that the blockchain is the highway. But then the coins and the tokens are the vehicles that trade on that highway and they serve different purposes. So bitcoin is a coin obviously you know the name, right, But then there are the things like tokens. Utility tokens are dow tokens. Bitcoin is a digital currency similar to

a physical currency. But in the case of bitcoin, it's not backed by anything, right, it's not a store of value for something like gold. You can't base its value off of you know, what it would trade in for gold. But it does have a numer It does have a number of a fee a dollar amount associated with it that we'll talk about in a minute. But they operate on their own blockchain with their own protocols. You can

use them as a source of payments. Bitcoin is the big one, and Ethereum you've probably heard of that as well. In coins, we talk about smart coins and we talk about sort of dumb coins. Bitcoin's kind of a dumb coin, not that it's a dumb technology. You just can't do much with it, but collect it, trade it. Now you can purchase things with it. Ethereum is a little bit smarter. Tokens are a whole different thing. They don't necessarily operate on their own blockchain. You can use them for payments

and for signing digital agreements. So think about that real estate purchase, right, you may use tokens in a digital blockchain world to complete or parts of that purchase or part of that paperwork.

Blockchain is a very useful piece of technology. It's vast, and it's in use already across the banking system. It's very prevalent in the bond market, even in the stock trading market. Blockchain is basically this massive digital infrastructure that is being been built out for the past decade and will be built out in through the next decade or two. So the building of the blockchain is a very big deal. Think of like the building of the American railroad. Think

about the building of the American Highway. This is what blockchain is doing in the world of technology. And these coins and these tokens and these dollar base coins, they all trade on it, they all drive on it. You need the blockchain for bitcoin to exist. If it weren't, if the blockchain wasn't here, we would never have had a bitcoin. So I'm giving you a massive list here of a bunch of the cryptocurrencies, but there are literally thousands of them. This is can look at it on

coin gecko dot com if you want. You can look at all of the digital currencies that basically exist and are trading right now. I just threw up thirty or so of them. So because maybe you've seen a few of them before, but Bitcoin rules the roost. It's the biggest of them all. And then you have others like ethereum and you have teather, and they all serve different purposes, but Bitcoin's the big popular one that gets all the attention,

and it's got the biggest price tag. This is just a way to look at a lot of the symbols you may have seen before. I encourage you to do your research on all of these, but we're going to talk mostly about Bitcoin today because that's getting so much of the attention. The thing about bitcoin, when it was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that entity is, it has a limited supply. If you go back and you read that white paper, you read it on your own time.

The way that Satoshi whoever Satoshi was, set it up was that there will only ever be twenty one million bitcoins to be mine. And when I say mind, you might be thinking of like gold mining, like literally going underground and picks and shovels and digging into the earth to extract gold. It's like that, but it's actually done with software, and it's done with computing power, and it takes a lot of energy. You may have heard stories about how much it costs to have produced just one bitcoin.

In terms of energy, you could power a small city, right. A lot of that's true, but it's getting a little bit easier that the energy use is not as intense as it used to be. But because there's only twenty one million bitcoin that will ever be mined, that's a limited supply, and that's one of the attractive features of bitcoin, especially as we see it at these very high prices. We're at about nineteen point eight million that have already been mined. There are not that many more bitcoin to

be mine. The thing about bitcoin, though, because you have to mine it solving a software equation or a math equation with software, it gets harder and harder for programmers to solve it. It takes a lot of computing power, it takes a lot of smarts, and it takes a lot of time. So as we get closer to twenty one million and worried about nineteen point eight million, it gets harder and harder to mind these things, which kind of raises the value. Tighter supply, more difficult to produce.

That's helping boost the price, along with a bunch of other factors. Right again, it's a supply demand issue. We're here right now, and well we're here a little bit further in twenty twenty four. Not that many more bitcoin to be mined. A lot of it's already out there. It's just more difficult to mind. And it has a scarcity issue. When you have a scarce resource that a lot of people are interested in, prices go up. I

don't care if we're talking about air Force ones. I don't care if we're talking about, you know, a brand new special iPhone. You know, scarcity of a product that people want and are interested in always drives price. It's supply demand and its mania and its hype, and bitcoin has all of these aspects associated with it.

Our stock market, the five hundred biggest companies in America, is up ninety one percent in the past five years. Guys, that's outstanding, right, Those are great returns for stocks. But when you look at bitcoin, it doesn't even compare the Dow Jones industrials. They're not all industrials. That's up fifty six percent. Gold and I use the ETF as the proxy is up about seventy eight percent in the past five years, and the dollar is up about ten percent.

So Bitcoin in terms of an investment, has returned a lot more, generated a lot more what we call alpha in our business because of this scarcity, because of the interest in it, and a lot of that has come in different waves. Rare Sean mentioned he first got introduced to it in twenty sixteen. Twenty seventeen, bitcoin had already been around. I remember back in twenty fourteen when it was two bucks, and no, I didn't buy it because

I didn't understand it. But the more scarce it gets, the more interest there is and the more adoption there is by both investors like US, individual investors or institutional investors like the fidelities of the world. The Black Rocks of the world, the Goldman Sachses of the world, and yes they're interested, and yes they're mining their own bitcoin. Well, that's just going to drive price even higher. So in the past five years it has blown out stocks by

a long shot. But let me take you back five more years beyond that. Ten thousand dollars invested in bitcoin ten years ago, that's where two point nine million dollars today. Now we want to talk about fear missing out or you know, I wish, you know, somebody would have told me about this and I just would have put a thousand. Well we can think about that. With everything. Bitcoin is super unique, with returns like this ten thousand, ten years ago worth two point nine million dollars today. We have

never seen anything like it in the capital markets. And I've been doing this for a very long time, so we can talk about why that's happened. But still, even with that massive price appreciation, Bitcoin is still much bigger than that. It's about a trillion and a half now, but it's very small compared to the market capitalizations of big assets that are already traded in our capital markets, real estate being the biggest worldwide. The three hundred and

thirty trillion dollar market. Global debt, we're talking about the bond market. Were talking about US debt, Chinese debt, Japanese debt, European country debt. That's a three hundred and fifteen trillion dollar market. FIAC currency we're talking about dollars, euros, YenS, Right, that's one hundred and twenty trillion dollar market. Bitcoin is

a trillion and a half dollar market. It's come a long way in fourteen years, but it is still a very small asset class comparatively speaking, and given the hype that it gets, barely anybody owns it, but the people that own it own a lie of it, especially some of the bigger companies. So we'll get into that in

a second. Just keep that in mind though, when when Rashad mentioned that eighty five percent of people surveyed say they don't own it, Well, you know, it's still pretty young, and it's still pretty small, and it wasn't until like the last year or two where it really became available for us to put into our retirement accounts to buy like an exchange traded fund, like we would buy exchange

traded fund that tracks the NASDAC. Right, it is still kind of a I wouldn't call it a baby, but I may call it like an eight year old or like a fourteen year old, because that's actually what it.

a long period of time. It's extremely complicated, and most people don't understand it. They buy it, don't understand it. So you should never invest in anything that you don't understand. So the whole purpose of this is to give you a real form of education, so you just have more confidence in knowing what you're actually putting your money in too, as opposed to just blindly just you know, throwing it and not even knowing what you're actually doing. Right, So

that's the purpose of this. It's not to debate whether XRP is better than Salana or not. It's to actually just give you some education so you can have some level of understanding that gives you more confidence. But then that also just builds a more solid foundation going forward, because like I said, you know you saw that chart.

It's still relatively early. That's the crazy part about it, right, So it's not going anywhere, so you know, you don't have to rush to just go out of your mind and just put your life savings into like you know, just take your time edge ducate yourself dollar cost average. The same rules apply as the stock market. But you know a lot of times people don't don't get that education. So that's why this whole thing is just designed to

actually educate you. We're going to talk about the onboarding process and stuff like that, but you know, first you got to kind of know the history, the trajectory, the fundamentals. This is how you you can you know, learn a little bit.

was like we needed data centers, we need to have them running at a high efficiency to do quantum compute or advanced computing.

to get you your goods right away. The other half are data centers full of super servers right that are doing massive compute power, either to mind crypto or to min ai used for AI computing purposes, to mind data to sell us more things.

based on that. We can't tell you which one of these is going to go up a thousand percent. I wish we could. If we could, we probably wouldn't be here right now. We would we'd be teaching you from the yacht. But what's important is to know what you own and understand this whole ecosystem and the history of it, so when people start talking about it, you can be like, I actually have a little bit more of an informed

opinion than that. Can we go back to some of the companies that are using because I think this gets into the use case, and then we'll talk about how to get into it. If you're not into it yet or you want to teach somebody else how to get into it, let me see if I can get back in there. All right, cool, So again, this is a fourteen year old technology. The bitcoin has been around for fourteen years. The blockchain has been being built for the

last couple of decades. But more and more financial institutions and processes are been preparing for this future, and the future is actually now right. PayPal is very involved in cryptocurrency. You can pay people with cryptocurrencies through PayPal. Master Card allows you to use some of your rewards to buy cryptocurrencies. Blackrock the biggest money manager in the world right it's got thirteen trillion dollars. It is offering bitcoin exchange traded

funds and ways to access bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through trust. Obviously, Square the payment platform, is in there. Fidelity Investments, one of the most stodgy sort of money financial managers in the world that's been around for the last one hundred odd years. They've been mining their own bitcoin for the past ten years. Abigail Johnson, the woman who runs that firm, is fascinated with this technology and the Fidelity is offering it.

And BNY Mellon, which used to be the Bank of New York, the bank that Alexander Hamilton founded quite two hundred plus years ago, they're into bitcoin too. So this is not like it's maybe happening. It's happening today. The biggest financial firms in the world are using it. The biggest payment firms in the world are using it. But what can you actually buy with it today? Besides turning it into fia. What can you buy with cryptocurrency, Well, you can go out on a limb in some places

and buy some property that's priced in bitcoin. The price of bitcoin changes very frequently, so you got to watch those prices. But there are some brokers in places outside the US mostly that'll allow you to buy in bitcoin. Some of these retailers will allow you to use bitcoin or cryptocurrencies like Ethereum to buy gift cards, and some of these retailers will allow you to place orders using cryptocurrency. Uber Eats will let you do it in some cases.

In some cities, game stops been accepting it for a while. Right it is out there and it's in use, But you're not going to go to Burger King or Carvel if you will and go with bitcoin right now, it's just not that widely held. But Ethereum, which is another type of cryptocurrency, a smart coin, we call it. You could go buy non fungible tokens like the pudgy penguins down there. Those are like ten grand each. I don't know why those are non fungible tokens. These are art

that exists in a unique way on the blockchain. There's only one of one of these, and that's another aspect of the blockchain universe. So you can't buy a pizza necessarily, except maybe one or two pizza parlors, and at the Dallas Maverick Stadium they'll allow you to use doge coin to buy a pizza. But in general, there are very few places that accept it as a means of exchange

right now, but there are growing. But if you wanted to get into it and you wanted to own some cryptocurrency, the first thing you have to do to trade it, to buy it, to sell it, to give it to somebody, to accept it as a gift is to have a wallet. Right, you need a digital place for this cryptocurrency to go. Nobody's going to hand you a stack of bitcoin. There is no bitcoin, right, it's just digital technology. It's a

software problem. So you need either a cold wallet, which really looks just like a hard you know, a what do you call those thumb drive even fancier. That's called a cold wallet, or you can buy or you can have a wallet on an exchange kind of like you do with your cash app or your bank app. Right, that's called a hot wallet that lives on the internet.

And if you open an account with a coinbase or a crypto dot com or a crack in or any of them, you're going to be opening what's called a hot wallet a little less secure because it's on the internet and all kinds of things happen on the internet with hacking. But a cold wallet is sort of an off site storage. Right, you have your own passcode for that. You have that one thumb drive that has all your

cryptocurrency in it. You better not lose it. And we've heard stories about people losing their thumb driver for getting the password and losing millions or billions of dollars worth of it. That happens, that's real, But it's your choice.

which leads to problems, could lead to problems. You have the option of buying it and then taking it off right and then using the wallets. Right now, this is important because, like you said, if you if anything happens to that right, let's say he's using the cold wallet and.

overseeing crypto. There is no SIPC like there is in stocks where that your your investments are being protected up to a certain amount. There's no FDIC like there is at your bank that protects up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of your money in the bank should something happen to the bank right there is.

to do is get it. I see a bunch of people put in get it directly from Ledger, get it direct directly from trays or there's a reason why they're saying that, because that is a questionary tale that can happen to people. It's a new space, right, it's unregulated in this sense, and so you want to make sure you take every proportion and every step is possible.

a digital footprint. But if you lose your pass code or you lose your cold wallet, it is gone.

hand experience. So the Chase thing, when I went to Chase two years ago, and Coinbase and they were saying that so many people were coming into Chase Bank trying to retrieve money because their coin based account got hacked. That didn't make that wasn't on national news or anything

like that. But this is this is people. This is the banker telling me firsthand, like how rampant coinbase hacks was people customers, How many customers was actually coming in saying that their coin Base got hacked and as a result their bank account was compromised, And that happens like that, It's not a fairy tale like it really happens. So the security aspect is something that's definitely real. I mean,

you can choose to do whatever you want. You can leave it on Coinbase, you can leave it on you can buy Robinhood, you can transfer it to your own personal wallet. But no matter, no matter what you do, there is some level of security that you should just be aware of.

If you're opening an account and setting up a hot wallet on a Coinbase, it's as simple as signing up for basically any app you've ever signed up for, or if you're signing up for the gym, or if you're signing up for a you know, online banking, the app for your bank, City Chase, whatever it is, it looks just like it.

sites or banking online banking sites. You are basically looking at a watch list of the things you might own, and then you're deciding whether to buy, sell, deposit money into your account, which would come from your bank account, your fiat fiata dollars Fiat you fund your crypto account with real dollars. That's where that you know, these two things come clash, right, and then you just transact. You make transactions. You can buy, you can sell, you can

buy with limit orders. And I'll show you what it looks like. I actually did it today for you guys. You got me so inspired. I went out and bought some bitcoin, and I set a limit order for some bitcoin. If it ever falls to seventy five, I'm want to buy some more. So let me show you how I did that. First screen here, this is my coin base account. I wanted to buy one hundred dollars a bitcoin. I looked at it on my watch list. Then it asked me what kind of order, just like I would if

I was buying a stock on schwab dot com. Is this a one time order or do I want to buy every month on a recurring basis dollar cost averaging as Rashad mentioned, or is this a limit order? I only want to buy bitcoin if it hits a certain price. The screen on the right is that seventy five dollars price. I'd like to buy some bitcoin if it goes down to seventy five because I think it's going to go back up again. If it does or again a recurring buy and my dollar cost averaging in. Then I set

my order. I'm paying with my checking account. There's my Schwab checking account. Hopefully the numbers not there anymore. They'll only let me buy five thousand dollars worth in a day. They set a limit for me, thank you very much, and then I review my order if I'm happy with it, and look, I don't have to buy Bitcoin is trading near one hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin. Just like docs, you can buy fractional or dollar amounts of any cryptocurrency.

You don't have to buy the full price tag of it. So if I'm buying one hundred dollars worth of bitcoin today, I'm buying point zero zero zero zero nine five four three seven bitcoin right a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The smallest, most possible tenious denomination of bitcoin is called a toshi. A satoshi like a penny, so cute but I'm with one hundred bucks. I'm buying just a very fractional amount. But that's the whole thing. I don't have to afford one hundred thousand dollars to buy

bitcoin today. I just want to buy a little bit every month because I want to keep owning it. And that's kind of the way I operate as an investor. I pick five or six coins and tokens that I understand where I think I know what's going on. And by the way, I don't really understand the way the business works, because there is no business behind these coins.

It's mostly belief. But I understand what their purpose is and could be I buy the same five, and I buy the same five and the same amount every month. If it price drops a lot, maybe I'll buy a little bit more. But I set up curring buys for myself, and sometimes I set limit orders if I want to buy it at a cheaper price. But it looks just like any online broker you've used before, just like your bank account, right. But there are a ton of risk

factors in investing in crypto. Rashaw just mentioned. Troy mentioned a couple of them. One of those is losing your password or having your account hacked, and that happens all the time. But also these are super volatile assets. When I say volatile, we're talking about extreme data.

based on belief. And that's a big thing you have to accept if you're going to own cryptocurrencies, whether it's tokens or coins, you have to understand that a lot of this is based on belief. And we can talk about that more in a minute. He talked about hacking, right. And we also, you know, although some financial institutions are allowing you to invest in it and even transact in some cases, it's not accepted by the federal banking institutions,

by the Federal Reserve, at least not yet. And I put the word yet there because we have a new presidential administration coming in and President elect Trump has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world. He said, the United States will mine its own cryptocurrency. It will never sell or hotal hold on for dear life forever to the cryptocurrencies that are already in our treasury that the United States Treasury got from arresting people that hacked

into other people's accounts. Right, it may happen that it becomes regulated, which would be antithetical. But another huge risk, and I bolleted it for a reason, is that there is an intense amount of ownership concentration, especially in bitcoin. A very few institutions, groups and individuals own most of it. And should they decide to sell at any point, well that could really drop the price a lot. And that's a very big and important factor, not just in cryptocurrency

and any security. But you want to make sure you understand this. Well, it's got these things going for it. It's got a really tight supply bitcoin, right, I told you only twenty one million will ever be created. It's got a lot of demand and a lot of hype. It costs more and more to produce it. It gets more expensive and timely to produce it's got competitors now, but it is, you know, the king of the hill. Up until now, the sec has not really been that friendly

to it. The Securities and Exchange Commission the top cop on Wall Street. But we got a new Securities and Exchange commissioner coming in with the Trump administration. He sounds more friendly. But bitcoin gets a ton of media coverage, a ton of media coverage for as small as it is, and all these things affect its price. Okay, I talked about the fact that it's heavily concentrated and that you know,

just a few entities own most of it. When you have this heavily of a concentration in an asset, anything can happen. The price spikes a lot. Why, Oh, because one or more of these entities decided they wanted to buy more of it. Oh the price drop? What happened? Well, some of these entities decided that they didn't want as much of it anymore. They can really impact supply demand

and ultimately price. And as an individual investor or somebody who's trying to trade these or hold these or buying for my kids for the long term, I have zero control over that, and not a ton of visibility. But when you look at who holds the most bitcoin coinbase, that's us individual investors that are buying an our own accounts Satoshi whoever that is. It's an entity and mysterious entity, but they do have a digital signature, so we know it's out there, we just can't track the person down.

Finance Blackrock the biggest money manager in the world. This company here, micro Strategy. This is a publicly traded stock that used to be in the you know, making equipment for servers, right it used to be in the AI intelligence business, but it's changed its business completely and for the past five years it's CEO Michael Saylor. All he wants to do is collect bitcoin and basically it's a bitcoin treasury and one of the best performing stocks this year.

safer going forward. Or you can look at it and say, well, if they own this much, then they're going to control everything, and it kind of goes against the whole principles of it being decentralized and d D and the small guys that will win. But this is this is the world does not work on fairy tales.

it is. That's just not the case. And I have a strong suspicion that they can still get because even you know, in the Middle East when October seventh happened, they got the Hamas's crypto, so bitcoin. So I don't know how they got don I don't know how they did that, but that lets me know that if they want to get your crypto, they're going to get your crypto.

That's just my own personal opinion that might not be an actual fact, but the fact that they actually got their their their bitcoin so quickly, I just think that they have some level of intelligence that if foot.

where did it get it's bitcoin? Right, Well, it's not like the Treasury and Jenny Yellen was out there scooping bitcoin, right, and it definitely wasn't happening in the administration before that. What is it from. It's from the seizure of assets from criminal activity that the Treasury keeps in its treasury. Right, So the United States owns bitcoin and Trump President elect Trump said they'll never sell it. Now he's catering to

the bitcoin crowd. It helped get him elected. But we do have quite a bit of bitcoin in our treasury, and if we're going to mine our own, there's going to be a lot more. And to your point, wher shot, it's antithetical to the way that bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoor, whoever that was, right, It was never supposed to be this, But it's gone capitalist real quick. Why because there's value in it. And once there's value in something,

here come the sharks, right. And if you want to swim with the sharks as a pilot fish or a fish behind the pilot fish and make some of that money too, and invest in it and learn about it. You can do that, or you can just say that's just capitalism run amuck. I don't want any part of it. But I assume if you're watching this you're interested in it. Just move on to the next slide real quick. Anyway, there's more.

it and to invest in it around the world. And a lot of countries are way out in front of the United States on this. Mongolia is big on it. El Salvador may try to make it. It's you know, it's it's fiat currency. That didn't work out very well because when they started it. I think Bitcoin was at forty thousand, then it went to like eighteen thousand, so that didn't work. But you see, it's these green you know, the green shoots are places where it's legal to transact

in it. China wants no part of it, Russia wants no part of it all the the Chinese government owns a lot of it that it has seized its own way as well, So that's where it's legal around the world. Now. If you're thinking about opening an account right and you don't know where to do it or how to do it, and you don't want to buy a heart that you know, the thumb drive and set it up that way because

it seems scary and complicated. You don' want anybody to steal it, or you don't want your housekeeper to throw it away. And you're thinking about an exchange, there are plenty of exchanges that would love to do business with you. We have that. I want you to scan the code if you're interested in looking at this. We do a very critical review of all of the crypto the major crypto exchanges to see which ones are best for who.

And if you want to look at our reviews, they're written by our own editors who are crypto traders and investors themselves, and we have the best for various types of investors or traders. If you're a if you're a hardcore trader, you might want something with a little more horsepower cracking is that one for sure. But if you just want to open an account and start collecting it, start investing it, start learning about it, all of these

are fine. Crypto dot Com is good, right, coin Coinbase is good right if you're looking at even cash app will allow you to have a Bitcoin account there. Robinhood allows you to have Bitcoin accounts and you can access bitcoin if you have an existing account with Fidelity or Schwab through exchange trade of funds that we'll talk about in a quick second here. So we talked about volatility before. This chart's old. I need to update or have my team update it. But you've got to have a pretty

strong stomach to invest in bitcoin. And people will tell you that they know why bitcoin fell from you know whatever that was twelve hundred down to nine hundred in twenty fifteen, but they really don't know. Somebody didn't want it anymore, right, it's the greater fool theory. It's whatever the next person thinks it's worth and if enough people think it's worth a lot, then it's going to be

it's going to keep going up. Then why did it spike to twenty seventeen to twenty thousand, Well that was after the Trump tax cuts, so it became a little bit easier on the capitol gains front to own risky assets. Maybe that had something to do with it, Maybe not, because it was going up from twenty fourteen, what interest rates were really low. So again, and it doesn't have

the fundamentals of a stock. It has technicals. You can look at patterns and how it trades, but you can't really open up the hood and say, what's wrong with the marketing department They're not doing a good enough job advertising the product, or what's up with the gross profit margins. It's not that type of thing. Just make sure that you know, you've got to have a strong stomach and know that bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies are super volaile. Ope,

I didn't get to update this one. But why has it been rallying since the election? Well, as I said, Trump promised that we would be mining your own bitcoin and he would make America the bitcoin capital of the world. But I wanted to talk about exchange traded funds.

very big deal. Now, if you own these ETFs, these exchange traded funds, which are baskets of securities, you don't actually own bitcoin. You own an exchange traded fund that tracks the price of bitcoin. And here's a list of the biggest ones by assets under management. When we talk about exchange traded funds, you don't just go pick one off the shelf. You want to look at the ones that have the most assets under management, the most liquidity,

the most money running through them, a track record. They didn't just get here, that are part of a reputable firm that has had good success launching these ETFs and a management team that you don't think is going to disappear into the Cayman Islands when things get weird, right, So I put a list here, but you could look at the top bitcoin ETFs. Again, you won't own the cryptocurrency itself. You will own an exchange traded fund that

tracks the price of that cryptocurrency. And that's super important if you don't want to own an Jane's traded fund. If you don't want to own the cryptocurrency itself, and you want to own stocks that are sort of tracking this whole ecosystem, well here's a list of them. I mentioned micro Strategy, the biggest Bitcoin owner out there. It's basically a treasury for bitcoin. That stock is up two

percent in the last three months. Canaan dot Io makes a lot of the technology for mining cryptocurrency, high powered fans and computer equipment that stocks up one hundred and ninety six percent in the past few months. Coinbase itself is a publicly traded company and it's a broker. That stock's doing great, up ninety one percent in the past

few months. Riot Platforms makes equipment for blockchain, for the development of blockchain and then bitcoin you can look at bitcoin's price itself, up seventy six percent in the last three months of fifty percent since the election because we have a much more friendly administration coming in and a new SEC chairman who actually likes bitcoin. So that's one ways to do it now. And when it comes to taxes, think of crypto in your account like a stock.

after your filing status is if you own digital assets. Now, this tells you that this asset has come a very long way. If the IRS is asking you that out of the gate, right, that's the first question. The real question they ask you did you receive as a reward or payment or property for services by sell, exchange or otherwise dispose of a digital asset for a financial interest. See instructions yes or no. If you put yes, then you were saying I made a profit on the sale

of my bitcoin. You're going to have to file that as a capital gains. It is a taxable asset. Even though it is unregulated. The IRS is regulating it. They have their You one more thing about keeping your crypto safe and secure. If you're opening a cold wallet, Troy mentioned that phrase right, keep your seed phrase confidential. These are multi digit phrases. Right, write it down, put it in a safe maybe send a copy to your mom, but don't distribute it widely. Store it away from your device.

You don't want the thumb drive and the piece of paper with your password next to each other.

be a financial advisor planner to understand this stuff. He has a very clean way of understanding of explaining it. I really like the Digital Assets Council. Lex Soklin is one of the most intelligent futurists that I know. Used to he hosted our crypto investing class on the Investipeda Academy when we had that. I trust him a lot. He's a super smart person who sees around the corner. Coinbase has a great educational and learning part of their website.

If you want to learn anything about all these cryptocurrencies, we have one too. Coinbase is more robust than if you're already have an account there. It's a good place to learn. The Black Billionaires Club, that's our boy, Lamar Wilson. He's way smart software technician, very high level thinker. But the Black Bitcoin Billionaire's Club. I learned a lot from him,

and he was at invest vest years ago. And then the Whiteboard Crypto YouTube series I think is pretty basic and pretty interesting if you want to learn these basics and really geek out on them and watch them for a while. They do a nice job of explaining things. Again, I'm Caleb Silver were Invested Media. All this is available to for free. I want to make sure if folks got that uh that barcode at the beginning, if they want to follow our educational stuff, scan that QR code

I should say, not barcode. And that's the intro to bitcoin on Investorpedia.

can invest something that mirrors it ETFs. If you want a higher level of security, you're not going to actually own the asset, but it'll track in the same direction as far as making money. Or you can have even more leverage with the stocks, and even more leverage if you want to do options on the stocks. Oh yeah, that leverages it even higher as far as the volatility on it. So it's a lot of different ways to go about a security something that's very very very very very important for sure.

when we traded stocks. The brokers eventually did away with those because Robinhood basically killed that business, right, and they just made trading free. And now we are the product of Robinhood instead of the actual transactions. But that doesn't exist yet in crypto because right we're not just trading shares of pieces of paper. We're trading software that had to be mined and created at one point. They call

them gas fees. You see it a lot in ethereum, which is a smart token you used to buy things like non fungible tokens, heavy gas fees. When you're buying and selling ethereum or using it as a transactional method, you'll end up leaking a little bit out, a little bit of big as we like to call it on the street, but that's what it is. Essentially. It doesn't exist anymore in the stock market, but it does exist in the cryptocurrency market.

are interested in buying crypto. Somebody super chat had asked the question that their friend had like fifty thousand dollars to invest in this Bitcoin is safest.

can go to zero a lot of coins. I've seen coins go to zero, master nodes and all these stuff, Like you know, that was a big mistake, all of these coins that I invested in, I would have just been better off.

the roulette pegs. Buy five of the biggest coins if you're just getting into the market and you want to learn about it. But bitcoin rules the roost right If you just bought in video, you would have been great in the past few years. Now, who knew that ps and video is making GPUs for mining cryptocurrency after it made a ton of money making GPUs for video games going on crypto and now it's doing it for AI. Why is somebody You're doing so well spending the right

place at the right time. But pick five healthy coins that have a history, a track record, and a software that you can basically understand, and dollar cost average your win, and don't risk more than five percent of your portfolio. Heck, don't even risk more than three percent of your portfolio if you're scared. Make sure you don't have a loss that is unrecoverable. And I would tell you that about stocks, I would tell you that about gold, I would tell

you that about everything. Don't have an unrecoverable loss. But Bitcoin, because it's new, and because it's speculative, because it as all of these issues where it's not regulated, but it might be. You never know what's going to happen, so don't make a risk that's so big that wipes you out completely.

It's like, yes, you can trade your US FIAT to buy bitcoin, right, but some of these other coins you have to convert to Bitcoin to actually purchase, so you might have to get ether, which means you'd have to buy ethereum. This is when it gets tricky, when you're trying to figure out where it's going, how to send it. I always recommend copy and paste, copy and paste if it is available, copy and paste. Can you talk about

that process, because I don't think people understand all. They want to buy Solana, but they don't know how.

That's why you have to understand the rules of how these are traded and how they are and how you can operate within them. So when Rashad says, just by bitcoin, it's the simplest one to understand. It has the longest price history in it, you can see kind of who owns what. It's the easiest one to wrap your mind around.

But I pick a few of those. But if you are converting between coins and there are transaction fees every time you do that, sometimes you have to open a special part of your account or open it up at a higher subscriber level, or pay a new fee because you're accessing a new asset class. It is not like having a Schwab account where you're just like, oh, well,

take some mutual funds and maybe some index funds. Let me buy a few stocks over here and some ETFs, and I'll buy a couple of bonds from my portfolio as well, all in the same supermarket. You're in the same supermarket, but you got to use different currencies to transact sometimes and it becomes very complicated. So you have to have a very smart way of keeping track of what you do, which really goes for all of investing, but especially here because it's all digital, right, and a

method to what you're doing. Otherwise you can burn a lot of money in trading fees and in gas fes.

end today. Lo and behold, they was saying one of his billionaire friends wants to buy TikTok and they're waiting for him to get an office so that they could purchase the company. So, you know, it's so much money, so much opportunity to be made in crypto. And if you listen to anything that they're saying, whether there's anybody in that in the in the in the circle, they're gonna do everything that they possibly can to pump cryptocurrency for the next four years.

That means paying back favors. Who's on the cover of Time as the most influential person or the person of the year today, who owns Time?

help you do that. Even Schwab will help you. I think Custodian, some ETF, some crypto ETFs, but Fideli's allowing you to do it today. Coinbases definitely, that's what they do. Robinhood allows you.

it all in one place for now. And if you decide that you need to get a little bit more advanced, then the platform you have doesn't access allow you access to the coins you want, or the tokens or the types of trades you want. Then it's okay to either take on a new one for those types of trades. But simplicity is best in a complicated asset.

I just die one day. Right, Well, if I never told anybody I have this stuff, it doesn't matter. I can't rely on life insurance companies calling you. They're not I worked in the industry. It's not going to happen. Millions of dollars of life insurance never gets paid out because they were never notified that the person dies. What ends up happening is that you're no longer alive, so you stop paying your premium, your policy lapses, and the company keeps the money.

custodianship of your crypto assets, otherwise it will disappear. Right, you have to have to be very explicitly laid out in your trust or your will.

next fool think it's worth? Because that's what the price is. That's where the price is. It's whatever the next person thinks it's worth. And if people think it's worth one hundred thousand and they own enough of it, that's what it's worth today. They could change their mind tomorrow. A lot of this is about belief and you have to understand that and accept that if you're going to be an investor in cryptocurrencies, that's just the game.

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