Study Hall: Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency with Fritz Charles

An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J. Trump's leadership. I'm Christy nom the United States

Sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

My graduates from my school being forced.

Back and drop drop Mike, drop back, drop drop. All right, guys, welcome back. Before we start, we gotta let you know you know. We got a lot, a lot of requests extend the sale for Ewyle University, and it was supposed to get shut down on January one, but as you know, Awyle University, or as you might not know, it's actually ending as its current form and graduate school will begin.

We're all involved.

Yeah, so if you know, if you if you listen to the podcast, you know that a our theme is transparency. We tell you know, our real stories in real life, and our guests tell their reil stories. And we also have the slogan of oney in shout out to nip Rest in peace. But it's real because we really tried everything at one point in time. We literally tried everything.

Exactly.

He tried everything.

Listen.

So all right, so here's the story you on crypto currency. Right, So two thousand and seventeen, right the draft, we got to take it back to the draft of twenty seventeen. So Donovan Mitchell shout out to Donovan Mitchell, right, hometown hero. And we were at the Barclay Center because we're good friends with his family and they invited us, and we were at the sweep when he got drafted into the mess. Yeah, once again, the Knicks screwed that up and didn't draft.

Yeah, we were sitting there, like you know, the Knicks had a chance to do it. He worked out for him. Dad was like, I think he got a chance and Noe.

Yeah, Frank, it didn't draft him, but he got drafted buy Utah. But anyway, we were still with his family and one of our good friends. Uh so, her kid went to a private school and one of his friends. This is why networking is so important, right, people that you meet. His friend was like a twenty year old kid, right, And I just met him and we was just talking randomly, like what do you do for living? My financial advisors, So we just started talking. Mind you, he's twenty years

I don't even think here he might have been twenty I think he was eighteen nineteen. I think something like that as a graduation gift.

Yeah, well you know that. And that's the power of family, of course, right he wasn't from our community, that's for them.

Sure.

So when he told me that, told Jamal, I'm like, well we got it, Like what's this? Like this because I heard about cryptocurrency. I heard about bitcoin, but I ain't really hit by Ethereum. I'm like hold up, wait, like what's going on here? And that's when I started studying it, but I still was kind of apprehensive. I ain't really sure. And then I see bitcoin. I'm just studying it. I'm just a student of the game, and like October, I see bitcoin just start climbing. It went

Yeah, that was like November.

Actually late October. It was late October. No, it was like November November. It was November. So I'm like, all right, cool. So I found out this app called coin bay where you can buy cryptocurrency. Right, So he educated me and he was telling me about like the three biggest currencies at that time, which is light coin, Bigcoin, and Ethereum. So he's telling me about it. So I'm like, all right, you know what I'm gonna put my money in. I put six thousand dollars and I told the group. I

Right, this is now December. Yeah, we went to Asia.

For twenty days in December. First we left for twenty days.

Don't let that go over your heads. Twenty days.

Now, I let a life you can write a book on. I'm gonna write a book down a life done. But we went to Asia with a return ticket. We went with a ticket there and a ticket back and two nights in bang Kak. That's it for twenty days. Were gonna figure as we went. We just winged it. We went to five different countries. Was just winging it as we were literally winging it, like we were buying hotels at the airport. He was just figuring it out day to day. So I'm in Asia and it's just so

That it's just doping.

Mean, yeah, yeah, I'm out and I'm out in Thailand, and I'm more focused on that than anything. I'm like, this is crazy. I'm like, I'm about to make a million dollars before summer. So Troy starts so I'm like, I'm telling the guys. I'm like, I'm sending them screenshots like I don't know what y'all doing. I'm getting money out here. So troys like he starts studying it, like

Like come home. This is this is like fact, right, So I heard about bitcoin prior to all this, right, because I was in the music downloading the services. Right, So at that time, the US has said early two thousand, they were like, yo, they're going to prohibit illegal downloads. Right, So that people started coming up with web sharing sites like mega upload, rapid shit, if anybody downloaded music, you

I was like twelve hours.

I waited. I said, listen, get you on, y'all gotta come home. I was like, yo, book a flight back. I found something. I said, that's a fact. We found something.

He kept talking about trying. He was like this, trying, like I.

Don't know, man, about tron I was like, less than a cent.

You know, it's funny, literally, you know you were like in the Homer Tronk.

Yeah, exactly.

I was right spot he just had to find that community.

Yeah, it was crazy.

I remember it was it was Hong Kong. Was Hong Kong because I remember in the background was all these lights.

I was Hong Kong. I was like, Yo, Jamal almost died story first story, but a different days he almost died. But I was a Hong Kong by myself, and I had all these lights in the background. You like, come home. I'm like, I'm in Asian. I'm having the time of my life.

Come home right now.

So so we came home, and when I got home, the first thing I did, I came his house and he educated me on how to like buy buy coin. It's a whole process. We're gonna talk about that, but how to buy coins, how to put the money in.

All that stuff, right, markets, all that.

So then I sow. So anybody that knows me know that I kind of have an addictive personality. I've never done any drugs in my life, and I'm a light drinker, but I'm very compulsive. It's worked out a lot of times. It's been very bad for me a lot of times as well. But I make very compulsive decisions. So when I started, I started making money and I'm like, okay, so now educated myself on what we call all coins.

We said it to ourselves, We're like, yo, if we don't make one hundred thousand by June, we did something.

Now that I was feeling out, I told you I was planning on making eight hundred thousand yea in crypto for that year. We calculated, calculations, did the whole thing. So everything wait, everything fell apart, not yet, no.

No, no, early January it went, it went down, but then it came back like late January, like all right, we're back, we're back, right.

I fell apart, I put more money in, I'm buy the dip, and then it fell apart again, and I put more money in. I said, I'm buying this dip. And then it just completely collapsed and.

He gave up on the space.

Yeah.

So but I said this, I said this. I said, look, if it was gonna die, would them right? And one of the things I heard that was powerful to me is the CEO of Ripples said this. He was like, the reason that this is gonna work is because if you think about money, right, what's the fastest way to get one hundred thousand dollars from San Francisco to London?

All right, So now we gave you my story. It's a tragic story.

It's a learning Yeah.

So all right, So can we talk about crypto leistart one on one? Right? What is cryptocurrency?

So cryptocurrency is uh digital asset that lives on the Internet that has value and where does the vit come from? It comes from people saying it has value? Right, And it's that simple and so and it's that simple, but was also that fickle based on what you just said, right? And the question is like a lot of people say or houses the currency? How's inking occurrency? Anything is the currency?

And it's so right, So that's the definition of the blockchain. Yes, it is validated by the blockchain exactly.

So yeah, so crypto current. But the name is little deceiving because it's not really being used as currency right now. It's more of an investment, right right, So.

It's an investment because due to people, due to the way it's moved and bigcoin being the first cryptocurrency, it's moving up and down based on the story you just said. People don't want to use it as a currency. So it's made to be a currency. It's made to allow people to move money back and forth. But because of the way it's structured. So bitcoin is structure in a way where there's a limited supply, right, it was a seventeen million, it's seventeen million now, but the max is

So it's like it's being viewed as a commodity.

Value exactly, right. So that's what Jason told me. Yeah, so all right, because this is something that's interesting. So people say, like, well, cryptocurrency is in thin air, it's not physical, it's not backed by anything, and I say, neither is the American dollar. American dollar used to be backed by gold, but I think in Nixon he changed it.

Right, Because I mean it's like you said, with bitcoin, there's a limited supplied. Once it gets to twenty one million, there's no more, right, so that the value of that will go up obviously, right. So that's why you get those projections like bitcoin will be worth five hundred thousand dollars for one coin, whereas a dollar. They can make a million of those every second, exactly day. So like, what's the real value?

Okay, so we have okay, So so bitcoin, that's what most people have heard about bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first crypto, the granddaddy of crypto currency, started by Shadoshi na Kamoto.

Anybody found them in there's a lot of people.

Nobody knows Satoshi Knockamoto. Did I say that correctly?

That was good, bro, I got that was good.

Anybody's not. The whole crypto thing is crazy. Anybody's not familiar to Guy's a legend. Nobody even knows that he's if he a actually ever really existed, or if he's a group of people, or if he's one person, or if he's still living, who knows. But he's the founder of crypto because he made bitcoin. Right then, from Bitcoin, you have thousands of cryptocurrencies, over two thousands. You have a whole bunch of different Ethereum to Ripple, and they

Well, and then you have so like from those right, the top three you named Bitcoin, Ethereum, those are like platforms, so people build on those platforms. So like Ethereum like a bunch of platforms that get built on. There is like a digital computer, right right, you can build on top of it. You could the Ethereum introduce the concept of a smart contract, right. A smart contract is basically a digital contract that says if then if this happens,

Right. If you think about the Internet, most of the like any website anything. The way it works is if then if this and that. If I like going to Gmail dot com and I put in my password, if the pastor was good, then it gives me access. If the past was not good, then it tells me you got the gown pass. So the theorem was the first time to take that that cold and put it on the blockchain makes it, makes it decentralized because like what I did the Spain.

That's a key word too, decentralized it right.

So Google centralized, like it lives like the way that the code works lives on Google servers in Mountain View, California, obviously throughout the world, but like that is where the hub is, that vending machine, Like that code is in that vendom machine. But the way that blockchain and crypto is done, it actually distributes the code around the whole world or whoever wants to be a validator and then

That was one of those those key words in that space is decentralized. And it was like if you think about it like a company, like right, like a lot of times, and it's coming up in the news now that that you know, the federal government is looking into them. But that data that's being sold, right, they're like the middle man selling it right, right. That's one of the things with this space is like there is no middle guy, you know what I mean, So it makes it.

Everybody right, Well, the one thing and that's one thing that I said. So when I first my first reservation before I started investing in cryptocurrency, I made a video on Instagram and it was my reservations on bitcoin, right, because everybody kept asking me my feelings about bitcoin, and I said this. What I said was, I think it's a good idea in theory, and I think that it's dope.

Are China, South Korea, they just said what not, you can't trade and then like if you were in the United States, like this was we ran into this problem too. It was like we couldn't buy on certain exchanges. So like one of those things like you said, like as far as like stocks, you can go to different exchanges. Same thing with this space right there was like finance was the number one, but we had Cryptotopia, metadox, all these others. Some of them we couldn't buy. This episode

Coach, the energy out there felt different. What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratches from the California Lottery players.

Everything those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off field play that made the difference on the field.

Hey, little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now, Coach one more question play than New Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco forty nine ers and Los Angeles Rams scratchers from the California Lottery. A little play can make your day. Peacely, responsibly. Must be eighteen years or older to purchase plate or claim because we were.

US citizens, right, so we had to drive you Icos, right, that was yeah, that was yeah, I lost somebody and that yeah. So ICOS initial episode. So ice Heil was the equivalent of an IPL. So like that's an initial coin offering. So when these companies are coming up with ideas, right, they need funding for it, they make an ic I.

Think it's important to illustrate why so many coins could exist. So it's over two thousand cryptocurrencies right now us. You could actually create an ey L token tomorrow. The reason why is because the currency is cold and the code is open source. So I could go and actually see how big cooin works, and I could actually create big I could change the B to F and make it fit coin and fritz coin is that that's the white paper. That's the white paper, right, So that's how it starts.

You need a community behind it too. Yeah. So like that, that's how you get these other coins. Like if you look now on the on like coin market cap, you'll see like a bitcoin gold or a big city like they'll say like, hey, we got that cold from that white paper, but we're gonna make it even better. Yeah, tweak it.

That's why it's like different. And another thing that was she did was he he made it open sourced, so anybody can change the cold It's an ongoing process of bitcoin. It's changing. Anybody can really, you could change it, right, It's not something that's set in stone. He did that So his vision and how I see it is that his vision was to eliminate the world banks and government from like he wanted to make it peer to peer and also open source, evolving where it's for the people.

It was actually funny enough. It goes back to my story. Like Leam Brothers, he's great. In two thousand and eight, he was these It derives out of the community of libertarians and archists, so people that didn't trust the government and there was level of high distrust amongst people from the financial system in general. Just because Villas went down and he had a community, he said, listen, I'm gonna create this thing that doesn't need banks. Like we could

Yeah, it's crazy, all right. So we read a lot of white peoples, man, we read a lot of white people.

So all right, so tax, right, because that's what you're doing now with the tax. So that's another issue because everything is so new that the government's trying to like catch up to it. Right, So we know how like real estate is tax a certain way stocks a tax a certain way. It's called capital gains tax. So can you explain the taxes on that, because that's that's what you're working with now, right.

Right, right, So I'll work with a company goo token tax and so the easy explanation is like TurboTax of crypto and so crypto, if you trade crypto, it's very hard to calculate your taxes because the assumption is that, all right, I go from let's say you're from the US, I go from dollar to crypto, and then I go from back to crypto back to dollar.

That's when I have to pay taxes.

But actually, when you're in the crypto world, like we said as about two thousand cryptos, you could trade from crypto to crypto and you actually have to All those things are taxical transactions. It's as if you when you sell one for the other, the government actually looks at that as a sell and a buy. And also there's other things like you could actually work for crypto and get paid in crypto. That's taxable. You also buy things in crypto and you that's also a taxable transaction. So

Right, I didn't go back to dollars.

But all those three transactions are tactical because when I went from bitcoin to bitcoin to ether, there I have to actually look at the USD value of bitcoins from each time and convert it back, even though I didn't go into dallars. So we allow that calculation.

And the government, I mean, they just put out an article last week where they're going to start taxing. They sent out ten thousand letters.

To people who So going back to how crypto started, obviously with UH there's a lot of anarchists, libertarians, and a lot of these people are like anti taxes because they.

Don't trust the government.

They the government is doing the right thing, and people were under the false belief that you don't have to pay taxes on crypto. But one of the things, one of the one of the things that they created was transparency in the blockchain, and so yes, the transparence, but arrests also see that those transactions too, right, So you actually are exposing yourself, so you actually have to pay taxes on that.

Yeah, And what's what's coin coin Gamma?

So coin Gamma is my own media platform. So it started with an app that I built as a side project in twenty fifteen. Twenty seventeen, I expanded it to a blog as well as a podcast where I interview leaders in the space and just provide education. And so what we do is we write about the space, we offer educational content, we interview leaders in the space, and we're actually going to start coming up with digital courses where people could kind of teach teaching. Yeah, so I've

I got a question, so in terms of like we said that crypto is kind of like the wild wild West a little bit, right, So like want to exchange and We've seen this happen a bunch of times. Want to exchange completely disappears, Right, how does someone even recoup a try to figure out the taxes on that?

Yeah, so the IRS hasn't given clear guidance around there. So this is a disclaimer. Does not tax device. Confirm this with your tax account tax expert. But you could either if it's an exchange, if it's a coin that because it was only an exchange, it doesn't exist anymore.

You could.

Basically what we've had people do is they've actually written enough at zero and basically it's like I lost everything on it, right, But if it's something like bigcoin that exists but the exchange just went out, you you just lost it, like you can't really write it off, right, That's I guess we jumped a little levels. We could talk about the risks like there's market risk, but actually just like operational risks in this space, that makes it very.

Hard to I was going to ask you, like, okay, one on one, Right, if somebody wants to start investing in cryptocurrency, right, they have a thousand dollars and they want they want to do it because it's not it's easy. Well, all right, how do you invest in cryptocurrency?

All right? I mean it depends where you are, but if you're in the US, you take it. You have to take your dollars, you have to be you have to transact on exchange that actually takes fiat, which is dollars and converts to crypto. Not most exchanges actually do not do that. So you mentioned Finance earlier. Finance doesn't take dollars, right, most, but there are some major exchanges in the US that take dollars and converted for you. And it's similar to like buying something on PayPal. Right,

And that's how people get caught up here. It's extremely complicated toorius.

Big had a legendary line, he said, shiokly for live man, not for fresh cryptocurrency. Don't play around with it if you don't understand what you're doing.

Because there's been plenty of days where we got calls like yo, not money, didn't go through. What happened? What happened.

Actually, it's probably gotten more user friendly now. I don't even look at it anymore. I have my money invested, but I don't look at it. But at one point I was looking at it every day. But it was extremely complicated when we first got in because you had to, like you said, you can't buy crypto currency with American dollars. You can trade dollars for bitcoin or ethereum or ethereum or light coin and coin base at that time that time, and then you can buy the other coins. It was

Now don't skip the step because that that the transaction speed was so slow, which is one of the things about bitcoin. So you had to So let's say you sent a thousand or five thousand dollars right, it would take maybe a half hour before it even.

Got Bitcoin was oh d I remember one kind Bitcoin took me five hours. I'm like, where's the customer service? Like, I'm like, going on, it's crazy. But the crazy thing I mean if you.

If I was to if I was on the Venmo or cash app and I sent it to the wrong person, I could hit up cash at and say, yo, I sent it, Ye, you made mistake, give me a charge back. If I said, if I Big America and I put that wire the money the wrong person, I can call them Big America. It may a mistake because this thing is decentralized, is owned by you, and it's owned you also mistakes.

It's in the black hole now so so then all right, so now it's in binance, and then from now you have to buy tron with the bitcoin and binance. So it's like a three part process. What happens is that and then you had so when you send it, they send you a code. It's a code that you have to put in to send it to one place to another. This is something that is extremely important. This happened to me. Happened to me on my birthday two years ago. I was I sent five hundred dollars. I was trying to

Somebody else gone.

Somebody lost like twenty one bitcoins like that, they lost twenty one bitcoins because they sent it to the wrong address or something and just gone.

It's crazy, man. But like even like that, it was like there's so many steps to it, like this is not like we weren't sleeping like legit were sleeping. It was like, you know what, I'm not eve gonna do this transaction to the morning, but by the time you wake up, the value could have gone up by like a thousand.

So because of that, you probably do moving so fast and frantic because you I gotta buy this, gotta bother this, and that leaves you open to making that mistakes even if you are sho now it's moving like a fiend. I was moving now.

I was moving like a fiend, like because it was like, we gotta do this right now. Oh they just so I'm like halfway like a week trying to do this on my phone and it's like damn, like I didn't really have time to really think about it. But you become addicted. You can. It's very addictive, especially at that time because there was so much money being made and it was moving so fast, and anything with crypto is that it's twenty four hours. It's like the stock market

They sellcoin's gonna drop exactly right now.

They know they know what they're doing. So it's like it's hard to day trade in that space because you get eating up. You get eating up.

That's what I saying. Like even if you're sitting in front of your computer, it's like you can't watch them all like it. I mean, this was like no sleep for like two months. Like you'll get text message like a group chat. It would be like I remember what tron went from less than a penny to like fifteen cents. I was like to thank you text for just coming in. I'm like I woke up, like yo, what happened? Like I missed it?

You know what I'm saying now because I brought Tron at two cents and it went to thirty eight cents. I think the highest that it got to it thirty eight cents. So that's why, like I said, when I went to swim from six thousand to twenty eight thousand, I had a couple I brought Ripple at like ninety cents and I sold Ripple at like three dollars and fifteen cents. So it was like the good Times was rolling.

Like?

How did somebody do that?

Yeah, that's a hard one. I think the space is early. None of a lot of these things are moving. A lot of these things are actually pre products, right, So people a lot of these coins out there are raising money on a hope.

Right. They're going out there and they're.

Pitching like a white paper, which is like their business plan, and they're saying, all right, well if you give us the money, and you'll get a coin and you will be able to use it for X, Y and z, and you have to study that. You have to look at their technology, right, because sometimes a lot of these coins actually are like you said, you took a bigcoin goal, bigcoin cash, there's like a bunch of big coins. There's

They got they got the whole terminology like hold total total h O L D h O d L hold on for their life.

Yeah.

Yeah, to the moon was like rocket. It was like when something was going up to the moon. That when they called those all coins shit coins, it's.

Old coins with just any coin outside of the top three. Really basically, you know.

It's a whole culture. Cryptocurrency was a whole culture.

I mean, we studied it down to the t right when we started. I know, Shoddy when he's amazing with numbers, So he started studying the market caps for each one, and then after we saw the market caps, we saw the coin supply. Right, like when you said that they have twenty one million, that means like, yo, in this space, that's pretty limited. But then you get a coin that that will come out as like there's only two thousand of it, right, whereas like Ripple was like something like

But here's the problem with show. You know, we talked about the Fiat currencies like the dollar, year, et cetera, and how there's each they have like a federal reserve that could create unlimited supply. A big coin doesn't have like a group of people. All these other coins actually are centralized, so they're actually a little bit more like

Just change the call we're gonna do more. Yeah, we're gonna do more.

Right, And there's no you know that it's it's a wild West because there's no sec to like stop them. There's like there's a lot of coin you know, in twenty seventeen, a lot of coins you know, raise all that money and they were supposed to come out with things and they bounced.

Right, feel took my money.

Yeah, it's scary, but like I think one thing that you know ra Sean talked about earlier is like you put six ks like that was that was what you could lose, Like even to this day, like I don't put money you could lose, like do not. At that time, I would get text with people like hey, like my retirement's not right, like putting money in retirement.

And like nah, only play with what you could lose.

Now, I don't don't play with the big boys if you're not if you're not ready, man, because like I said, now it's real talk. We don't have control over this. It's very and we have control over anything but especially crypto because it's very thin. It's very thin, and that's one of the things that actually got me involved. Once I saw the market cap. I saw the market cap, it was like one hundred what's the market cap.

Now, it's probably like two hundred and the two hundred.

Million, right, no, no billion?

Yeah, so we got a pretty hot to like nine hundred a trillion.

Yeah, it was supposed hit a trillion by the time. I don't think it was even at a billion at that time. I think it was like nine hundred million something like that Bone Story show. Even where it's at now a couple hundred billion, that's not a lot of money. That sounds like a lot of money, but that's really not a lot of It's really not.

A lot because if you look at traditional assets. I tell people all the time, Yeah, the whole crypto market is two hundred and fifty billion dollars, but guess what, Fidelity one investment shop has seven trillion of assets. That's the fact for themselves, seven trillion, right, So like this is this is a spectam.

When I first got into it, I'm like, look, it's a lot more room for it to grow because the market value is so low, and that's one of the things that made me get into and that's one of the reasons why I still actually hold out hope because I feel like.

That's why I said, if it was going to die now, I would have died over the last year.

Exactly right.

It's like people people gave it the bigcoin went down, people like it's over, like it's a wrap, and it came back up, and it's trading, kind of trading, and we never know why.

It's just people to belief, you said, right, it's the belief.

My graduates from my school being forced back. Drop bags drop, oh my drop beg drops.

You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy? Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have forty