Bitcoin Explained To A Guy Who Knows ZERO

DANO WEIR: I've got a little thing here that's going to make you laugh, I think. It's going to take 35 seconds.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's the tall order.

DANO WEIR: It's going to take 35 seconds. Okay. Darren, I want you to imagine back in the day playing Super Nintendo.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I remember those days.

DANO WEIR: Super Mario World. And as you collected coins, your coin total started to increase.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's true.

DANO WEIR: Now I want you to imagine that no one else in the world had that Mario game. So the Mario coins you had were the only ones in the world.

DANO WEIR: Now imagine you could extract those coins out of the game, trade them to other people for other things in a transaction that was completely outside the purview of the normal banking system.

DANO WEIR: So word starts to spread that you're doing this and a few people actually want some of your Mario coins but they have no Mario coins themselves to trade back to you so you say okay give me some of your dollars i'll give you some coins now they have coins with which they can use for purchase and transactions outside the banking system but you're running lower on your coins because you started trading them out but you've got some dollars in return so you go back to your Mario game and you play some more and get some more coins but you learn that you can only get a total of 99 coins from the game.

DANO WEIR: Now you realize your Mario coins are an extremely limited supply, making them ever more valuable to people who want to make purchases and transactions outside the banking system. More and more people start having interest in Mario coins as the ones you traded out are then traded to more and more people.

DANO WEIR: Word spreads about your Mario coins and the big banks and governments start seeing it as a threat to their own dollars and currency. So they start making their own moves to legitimize your Mario coins. But just as Pepsi rose to oppose Coke, people say, baloney, we don't need Mario coins. I got Sonic the Hedgehog rings. And now they have their own rings with which to do transactions outside the banking system. Is that crypto?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: What you're describing sounds a lot like Bitcoin, Dan. And those other things is crypto. Now, Bitcoin's part of crypto, but it's... Different than a lot of the other cryptocurrencies.

DANO WEIR: I think I need to learn.

DANO WEIR: Welcome to It's All Money. Hosts are right here in front of you. You're checking out It's All Money.

DANO WEIR: Welcome to It's All Money. You're inside the Sonoma Wealth Advisors conference room off the Sonoma Square. My name is Dan O'Weir. I'm the marketing director and podcast host here of the show. And I'm joined by Darren Blonsky, CFP and CDAA. Should we say that description today?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You can say that.

DANO WEIR: You're a certified digital asset advisor.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, you can say that. Yep.

DANO WEIR: Bitcoin is, as we're sitting here in the conference room, nearing, approaching, edging right on $100,000 value. And we figured that was a great opportunity to answer some really basic questions about it. Because as you can see from my intro, I don't know a lot about it.

DANO WEIR: I kind of have a vague concept of it. But I and many other people don't know what this thing is. Darren knows what this thing is. So we thought we'd do an episode today and talk about Bitcoin. Maybe, maybe even during this episode hitting 100,000.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That would be amazing.

DANO WEIR: So what is it? What is crypto?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, I think the challenge with answering the question, what is crypto, is it depends on what your perspective is. That's what crypto is, right? For some, it's funny money. For others, it's an asset. For others, it's a way to get outside the regular banking system. For even some, it's rather to transacting criminal behavior. It's been all those things. It's been call to reserve. Well, at least Bitcoin has been.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Called a reserve and chair pal today actually said that Bitcoin is just like gold i quote and worth more than silver as we're recording this right now right worth a lot more than silver per Bitcoin now so let's go back to the beginnings of crypto so crypto is short for cryptography right it's it's the practice of using digitized processes to you Make sure that the people who are supposed to read or own something own that or can read it only and that no one else can do that is kind of the best way to think about it, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So it's how do we use programming and digitalization to transfer, whether it's an image or in this case, if it's Bitcoin, you're transferring value. And it's been around for a long time. It wasn't popular until after 2008 when this. A mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin white paper.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And what it was at that point was a bunch of cyberpunks, basically, anti-government libertarian types, trying to figure out, was there a way for us to transact and not be beholden to what the Federal Reserve is doing or any other central banks or governments that are corrupt and funding their wars, etc.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that was the origination of it. And so this character named Satoshi Nakamoto, he started writing on these boards about, hey, I think I figured out this thing, and here's this white paper. And it was this evolution. And in the beginning days, it was just a bunch of super computer nerds, people that understood cryptocurrency or cryptography. And then it slowly has begun to translate into the broader public.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And has become more accessible to people like me who are not a programmer and don't know how to read the programming in code so that's the original and we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is nobody knows in fact there was just an hbo special on it who is Satoshi Nakamoto and they proclaimed to have some evidence which then was very quickly shot down nobody knows and i think that makes part of the allure of Bitcoin because no one knows who created it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: There's some people say the CIA created it or some nation state and they're going to pull the rug under at some point. Yesterday, Putin came out and said there's no one that can stop Bitcoin. Even we're seeing these massive government organizations talking about having strategic Bitcoin reserves.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In fact, there's 10 different states right now that are pushing legislation through their states. They're looking to buy a strategic Bitcoin. Bitcoin Reserve. So now it's me hitting this critical mass point. And so if you look at it, what do I think it is from an investment standpoint?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I could go off on many different angles of it, but at the bottom line, it's a maturing asset. It's an asset that should be considered in a portfolio. This is not financial advice, but you should consider it as a potential asset in one's portfolio.

DANO WEIR: I want to try to create some out of thin air. Just if I could, for somebody who really can't conceptualize it, because it's not a coin that you can hold.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Right. It's not physical.

DANO WEIR: But if I had a, this is not right, but if I had a string of 10 numbers or 10 numbers and letters, like a password, and then you did a job for me, maybe you came in and painted my house. And I said, okay, thank you so much. Here's two passwords. Now you've got two of my coins. Is that about it, basically?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Sort of. Yeah. I think that's a good way to look at it without going too deep into it. But the basic essence of the blockchain or the Bitcoin blockchain, because there's different types now, the essence of it is there's a public key and a private key, which is basically access to that particular block on the chain.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And you might have a public key or a private key. The way you protect that is keeping your private key private and everyone can see your public key.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so if you come to me and say, hey, you paint my house and I'll give you one Bitcoin to paint my house, what I would do is on the system essentially send that access point to you so that you would have it. Right. Or that private key would now be in your possession. And that's one of the beauties of Bitcoin and how it was created is it's a trustless process. I don't have to trust or verify you that you're.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A reasonable economic actor because the minute you give me that private key it's mine i'm taking it right so there's no requirement to say Dan's a trustworthy guy as soon as we get that it transacts which makes it powerful in an economic environment where perhaps people are it's hard to trust right you you think about like the u. s dollar for example if i'm going to you For example, I bought an ATV for my ranch to drive around and do work and put fence posts on.

DANO WEIR: It was for a music video.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's true. It's for music.

DANO WEIR: You're making a country music video.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So I was buying this ATV and I said, yes, I'll take the ATV. It's used. I said to the person selling, I said, how would you like to do the transaction?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And his comment was, I'd like cash, which means I have to physically go down to the bank, make an order of cash. Cause I. Actually don't have all your cash in the bank. Hate to break it to you in a fractional reserve banking system, which is another episode for another day.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Not all your cash is in the bank and you actually have to order your cash if it's above certain thresholds, put an order in and then get that cash carried out. Now you have the risk of I'm sitting with a wad of cash going up to somebody I barely know and saying, here's the cash for this thing.

DANO WEIR: So if the guy you're buying the ATV from had said, oh, I'd like to do the deal in Bitcoin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I could have simply just basically tapped our phones together and transacted. And I said, well, why isn't that just like Zelle? Like Zelle's another product that banks use out there that's very similar, but Zelle has certain thresholds that makes it very difficult.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Zelle's tracked by everything. So there are people that do believe that the government shouldn't track everything that I spent. It shouldn't be any of their business. That's basic liberty, right? Whereas like a Bitcoin, I could say, let's do the transaction in a fraction of a Bitcoin or Satoshi, tap our phones together and effectively release that money to you.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that value you would see immediately come into your account. Well, that's pretty powerful in a United States Of America where we can just transact that quickly, very efficiently, and very low costly.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's a whole different ballgame if, say, I'm in Mexico and I don't trust the Mexican peso because the government's inflating it away. So if I'm an economic actor and I earn a bunch of money. What do I do with that money? Do I keep it in the Mexican peso?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Or do I put it in dollars? Well, this creates a whole new solution for people because they can say, look, I can create it and put it in Bitcoin and travel anywhere in the world and have access to it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And there's not a darn thing anyone can do about it. So it creates a whole new frictionless payment system or economic transaction system. So eventually, if enough people start saying, wow, this is pretty incredible. I want to be a part of this. You get this mass.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: As you were explaining your Mario story a minute ago this massive people start saying i want in i'm going to use it and you get this network effect where there's all these people start using eventually it becomes in such demand is so utilized that you can't stop it whoever says well why would the government allow that to happen why would the government allow Bitcoin to come into existence they can't control it they would u. s government rather have the dollar Because if they have the dollar, they can print as many as they want.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And Bitcoin, there's only ever going to be 21 million. So why are they going to allow that to exist?

DANO WEIR: Okay, let's stop you right there. So first off, what I want to say is something that's different about this Bitcoin discussion is often on the internet, when someone's talking about Bitcoin, the end of the conversation where they're educating you about Bitcoin is, and oh, by the way.

DANO WEIR: I'm selling some Bitcoin or you should look up my trading service. So I forgot. I wanted to say that at the start of this episode, at the end of this episode, we do not pitch you on how to buy Bitcoin. This is educational. You've been wondering what it is.

DANO WEIR: You've been hearing people talk about it. This is for educational purposes only. So that needs to get said. Second thing, 21 million. You don't blow right past that. There's only 21 million who set that number where there's a limited supply. What is that?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's Satoshi Nakamoto. So if we look at basic supply and demand, part of what he was trying to do or she was trying to do or it was trying, no one really knows, whoever this Satoshi Nakamoto character is.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: If there's only ever 21 million as demand increases, they also programmed in the code for supply to decrease. So there's already been almost 20 million bitcoins already mined. And we can go into what mining means in a minute. But mine, there's only another million and a half or so.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Bitcoin that are ever going to be mined in the history of the world. So as the demand goes up, the supply is capped, which is very different than the U. S. Dollar. If more people want dollars, what's the government do? Print, baby, print.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In 2019, our federal debt was 19 trillion. Today, five years later, it's 36 trillion. Figure that out. In five years, our debt has gone to 36 trillion from 19 trillion. Why? Because the government's just print, baby, print. Everyone's freaked out. Hey, this president just won the election.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: What's going to happen to my money? Well, the reality is, guess what that president's going to do? Just like if the other president had one print, baby print, they're just going to keep printing. And so all of a sudden there becomes this need for assets that can't just be inflated away.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Right. Because when government prints more money, it's inflation. And when it creates inflation, that decreases the value of that dollar in this case.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: When you have a fixed supply and you have increasing demand, what happens to price naturally based upon economic laws? It goes up. So as that network effect pushes that demand higher, you're sitting there saying, well, there's only ever going to be 21 million of these Bitcoin and how many billions of people in the world.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So what am I going to do? And so a lot of the Bitcoin people buying are saying, look, even if this thing falls to nothing and goes to zero, I'm still going to buy me some of that because. Just in case.

DANO WEIR: But can Bitcoin be split? Can the coins be split?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. So each one Bitcoin can be split into Satoshis, right? So as the dollar is the value of one Bitcoin goes up, you can break it into a smaller denomination.

DANO WEIR: Is there a limitation on how small you can break it?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A million into one Satoshi i guess you could go into fractionals well so if you can fra if you can break it up then then couldn't you just infinitely keep breaking it in which case it's like an inverted inflation well so this is what's interesting and so this is getting into like way weed so like everyone's mind's gonna get blown right now but Bitcoin is just a code okay and the reason that Bitcoin is so powerful.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And the reason that the Chinese government hasn't been able to stop it, the reason the U. S. Government hasn't been able to stop it is because the code exists on independent computers around the world. So the only way to shut down the Bitcoin is literally cut off every computer simultaneously around the world. Forever. Forever. The minute you turn it back on, it's back on.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So it's like this thing that's there and you can't really control it now. Right. So. As those nodes communicate with each other and that what those nodes are doing, it's being you and I saying, OK, this is a pencil. Yep, this is a pencil. And the nodes are communicating back and we're agreeing what that is. You have to change all those nodes at the same time in order to change that code.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yes. So in theory, if you got 51 percent of those nodes to say, hey, this isn't a pencil. This is a pen. Now you could change the code. Ok, the problem with that. Is that it would take so much energy to fuel those nodes that it would be near impossible. This is a year or two ago. I heard the analogy that it was basically the equivalent of Powell Dam or Hoover Dam.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: One of our clients calls it Boulder Dam because there was a controversy historically about it. But it would take eight times the power of Hoover Dam to be shot at the network. All at the same time because it takes energy to change that code effectively, which is possible, but not probable. Like what power source could concentrate that much power and get it to the nodes all at the same time to hack the Bitcoin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that's what makes it so impenetrable and protects your Bitcoins, your Bitcoin, my Bitcoins, my Bitcoin. So in theory, If we got all those nodes that were communicating to agree to make a change to the code and say, it's not a million, now we're going to split it more, you could do that in theory. But getting all those nodes to agree at the same time would be pretty difficult.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Because if I'm running a node and you're running a node and the three other people here are running a node, we're all participating in the security of the Bitcoin chain. Because my node has to be shut off. And so does yours have to be shut off. And we all have to make agreements about what that, who owns what. And that's the security of it.

DANO WEIR: Is this like the babysitter's club, but you're Bitcoiners and you get together and you talk about stuff?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: There's definitely that element. Yeah. It's actually. Hey guys. I've been to a couple of conferences and it's, it's like a, it feels like I go to those conferences and like it's cheese ball. It's.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Sitting around that's kind of the culture the history of Bitcoin and i think that's what turns off a lot of people i'm not really into that i'm not really a joiner that way the way i got into Bitcoin was actually my dad and he was interested in ripple which just overcame a lawsuit by the scc whether it was a security or not and my dad's like hey you really need to check these things out and this was 2017 ripple ripple XRP whole nother story it's a it's a it's a crypto you coin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You'll probably be hearing a lot about it because the gentleman who's in charge of Ripple Labs, XRP is going to be probably pretty involved in this next administration. So long story short, my dad was like, hey, D, you need to check these things out. And I'm like, dad, that's just junk. I come from the Wall Street world and I just started reading about it. And I'm like.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And the more I learned, then I was like, wait, something's going on here. Something's changing. I can't just dismiss it as funny money. In fact, anyone I've ever had a debate with about Bitcoin that actually tried to debate that it was bad or not right or something, it actually came down in that negotiation.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They just didn't understand. They just didn't have correct facts. And once I had done that diligence, I'm like, all right, let's say it's nothing. Let's say it's complete funny money that is complete junk. There's only ever going to be 21 million.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So I'd be a fool not to buy me some of that because I just don't know for sure. And there's certainly a big enough network effect at this point and enough demand considering we're tapping on the ceiling of $100,000 per Bitcoin in a little over 10 years that I need to figure that out.

DANO WEIR: Is it used for illegal transactions?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Absolutely. But so is the US dollar. So when people say to me, well, Bitcoin is just for illegal transactions, I say, well, guess what? What do you think the number one currency in the history of the world for doing illegal transactions is? It's the US dollar.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So, okay.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And before the dollar, it was a different currency. And if you go back far enough, there was illegal transactions done with gold. Right. So are we going to say that this particular thing is bad because of what people choose to use it for? Well, guess what? I got news for you.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: From the beginning of history, people have been doing mean things, criminal things, things that were awful to other people. And they've been using different forms of currency to pay for it. And now it just happens to be Bitcoin. It's just that governments don't like it because they can't control it. And that's the issue.

DANO WEIR: Okay. And governments have been showing more. Interested in and attempts to control it, what things have been done in the United States to do so?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I mean, so why I think we should go to some of another concern people will often bring up is, well, can't it be hacked? Bitcoin, the chain itself can't be hacked, possible, but not probable. What happens is the exchanges that hold people's coins. So when you put your money on exchange, you're actually giving that exchange your private keys.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Okay. Right? So they're holding that.

DANO WEIR: So, okay. So instead of holding them yourself, you're worried you're going to forget them.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You give them to one of the exchanges.

DANO WEIR: There's an exchange which will hold the keys for you. That's right.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Which was Mount Gox originally, and Mount Gox was hot hacked.

DANO WEIR: Okay. So these exchanges are banks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: More or less. Yeah. They're more or less exchanges. Banks don't like them to be called banks.

DANO WEIR: They're functional there there are the equivalent of a bank though they're a place that is saying hey you're worried about the security of asset we'll hold it for you we'll hold it for you in exchange for fee that's right that's it that's bangs don't want to be said they're bang but never never because they don't pay off politicians right.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Okay but one of them got hacked Mount Gox got hacked and then everyone says oh this Bitcoin stuff it's going to get hacked etc it was never Bitcoin that got hacked it was Mount Gox the exchange because some idiot Left all these passwords on a file somewhere, all these private keys on a file somewhere, and someone broke into it effectively. So, of course, it's going to get hacked after a while.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: What you've seen interesting from the recent administration that just got elected is a lot of warmth towards crypto. In fact, the new incoming SEC chair, we suspect, is very pro-Bitcoin. And part of that is because what the Bitcoin world realized... A while back was that they need to start lobbying the government to get their perspective included in the laws and regulations. And that's happening in a big way.

DANO WEIR: Why do they need the government? Isn't the whole point that they don't need the government?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Look, every, everything from the, any revolution from the beginning was outside the government. And then what the government, they go legit, they go legit. So they're going legit. They're going KYC as we call it, know your customer, right? Who owns these things?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And KYC is now changing aspects of crypto and Bitcoin and changing taxation. All those kind of things are happening and they're in play right now. And then there's different power players who have a lot of money lobbying to get their perspective included.

DANO WEIR: I was in... Petaluma, where I live.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's not a Bitcoin.

DANO WEIR: I was in it. Where were you guys?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I was wondering where you were.

DANO WEIR: It was the Pacific Market, Pacifico Market, El Pacifico Market on Lakeville, which used to be the old Doolittle's paint next to the string factory. And in the back, there was a Bitcoin ATM. And I sent Darren a picture of it. And I just thought to myself, I don't even know what that is. So that will give me a Bitcoin out of that? How would something like that?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, think about it, okay? There used to be this company, and I'm blanking on their name. They were a Fortune 500 company that is no more. And their whole Western, what is it? Western, anyway.

DANO WEIR: Western Union?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Western Union. Western Union's business was, hey, Dan, you leave some Central America, whatever, some country, and you want to ship money home to your family. Western Union will move that money for you, and they'll take a little bit of fee on that. So you're in a market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's a market that appeals to a Latino community who's shopping and getting food there, right? That's the name of the market. And you work up here in the United States and the dollar goes a lot further and mama's back in Guatemala. Let's say, so it used to be, you have to walk into the Western Union and say, here's a money order for mom.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I'm sending money home. Now what happens is, okay, here's some dollar. I'm going to convert it to Bitcoin and mom's got me a wallet and I've got me a wallet and we're going to go bink and move the money. That's why you found it in that market, I suspect.

DANO WEIR: Right. Interesting. So it's just the process. It's not necessarily owning and storing Bitcoin per se. It's just using Bitcoin in that instance as a way to transfer.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Wealth and money around the world in a much more efficient way.

DANO WEIR: Shout out to Guillermo, by the way. He owns the market. He was great. The place is awesome.

DANO WEIR: Okay.

DANO WEIR: I feel like you've already answered this question, but I'm going to ask it again. Is it more dangerous than dollars, yen, euros, traditional currency?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I mean, it's kind of like... Is this knife more dangerous than this knife? It's a tool, right? If we attach an emotional thought to it, then it becomes whatever you want to attach to it. But it's just a tool, right? In fact, if someone's using Bitcoin to do illicit things, they're an idiot.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And there's a lot better cryptocurrencies. One of them, I'm not going to name it on this show, but there's a lot of other cryptocurrencies out there that...

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Allow you to remain a lot more anonymous than Bitcoin that's my next question because it's not the only crypto so what are other crypto how many are there well there's hundreds and hundreds thousands of them right like it's like every influencer is creating their own crypto on different like the bigger ones are Bitcoin Ethereum Solana XRP or ripple those are the some of the bigger ones there's dogecoin which Elon Musk is a big fan of you know and every so often there's these these, you know, we call them meme coins, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A meme comes out, they make a coin about it, and everyone runs up the coin. Who makes the coin? Just entrepreneurs.

DANO WEIR: Somebody programs. They hire a programmer, and Ba-Da-Da-Da-Da, I made a coin. Yeah. And now there's five million because I decided, and now, boof.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They're pump and dumps, basically, right?

DANO WEIR: That's why, like, when we were setting up this episode, you pulled up this picture of all these cryptos, and there was Bitcoin, and there was Solana, and there was Tether, and there's all these different, you know, different, you know, crypto tool i had a picture of doge on the screen he was so offended he said take that down we can't i will get ruined in in my Bitcoin book club for having doge on the screen in fairness Dan i used to be part of a Bitcoin only group on Twitter that there's just people who would only talk Bitcoin and they call maximalists and i exited the group because i got tired of the religious indoctrination right like and i think as things mature like you you find your place in people and i just look at like a tool Bitcoin's a tool yeah and i like the fundamentals of that tool over this tool and that's why i choose to look at it one of the things that i do on this show is that i get to stare deeply into Darren's eyes for like 30 minutes and i can tell when he's getting hyped about something so i'm going to communicate now to our production team and say we're going to blow out that second episode and we're going to let Darren go for a full hour on this topic you Dead serious because we're not even halfway through everything we can talk about.

DANO WEIR: Are you ready to go full Bitcoin? He's ready to go today. He wants more today. Okay, so Bitcoin, I believe it was when did the ETF start? Was it last year?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yes, we're just.

DANO WEIR: It was approved at the start of the year, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Did you say it was this year?

DANO WEIR: Yeah, it started this year. So it started 2024. Remember that.

DANO WEIR: Is a Bitcoin ETF actually Bitcoin?

DANO WEIR: What, what is what, how is a Bitcoin ETF different than just buying straight Bitcoin?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah. So it's, again, it's going back.

DANO WEIR: Exchange traded fund.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Right. So I'm going to start with talking about gold and then I'm going to go to BIC and answer that question. So I think it's easier to make sense of that because people understand gold fundamentally, right? So gold, we go on the ground, we pull it out of the ground, we create it. Why, what makes gold valuable? Is it because it's super pretty? Maybe, but it's also a class thing, right? There's a network.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Effective if you wear gold it says something about you apparently like you're more wealthy at least that's been historically gold's also you can't take my gold it's physical it'll never disappear gold has properties that are very hard to break it down right it doesn't break down in nature generally it lasts that's why you find it in creeks because it's rolling around in creeks and there's nothing easy it breaks it apart but it doesn't break it down per se when you placer gold as we call it, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So there's a scarce supply of gold because it's very hard and very labor intensive to get out of the ground. In fact, it's very costly to get out of the ground, right? So if gold's too cheap, then it's not cost-worthy. And we've seen gold this year have absolute incredible performance just go through the roof. People tend to buy gold when they're fearful, right? They tend to buy gold when they love somebody.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Gold is a transmission of wealth. It just can be looked at as a store of value to actually outperform the S&P. Depending on time periods you look at.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Now, gold, you can buy the physical gold, but it's difficult to buy gold, right? If I buy a big clunk of gold, I'm going to put it in my pocket.

DANO WEIR: You got to store it, right? You got to protect it. Same issue. Possibly. Same issue.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Issue. If I'm going to take my gold and I'm going to move to somewhere, I got to bring my gold. I got to protect it, right? It's the same issue with the dollar. There's real downsides to the physicality of it, right? And if we look at how gold works- So we can buy the physical gold. Another way to own gold is own an exchange traded fund or ETF that actually tracks the spot price of gold.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so as gold goes up, that ETF will purchase more of that gold in that exchange traded fund or that wrapper. And then the value of the ETF is going up.

DANO WEIR: So the money that you put into a gold ETF is not necessarily buying gold.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It is, but it's.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You're buying it you're buying the price of gold buying the price of gold so when you put money into a gold etf and it's following the price of gold what is what happens to your money there is it sitting it's being held in trust for that particular exchange traded fund there's a particular vendor that i was just talking to a week and a half ago actually that if you buy their gold etf and you give them five hundred dollars you can actually take physical receipt of that gold that you bought in that ETF.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So you're buying that gold act, but you're not taking physical, you're not physically receiving it. So it's a way to buy access to that asset class, but not have the wear and tear of owning the physicality of it. So when you think about that, well, it's similar to Bitcoin ETF, right? So if you look at every day now, BlackRock, for example, I bit, this is not an endorsement for I bit.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But just as an example, cause it's the largest ETF in the world. Now it's bigger than the gold ETF. I believe it's the largest, don't quote me on that, but it's bigger than the gold one. I know for sure. And soon to be in there purchasing literally like five to 8,000 Bitcoin per day. And mind you, there's only 21 million.

DANO WEIR: So where are they getting them from?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They're buying them off exchanges, right? So they've worked with like some of the other exchanges and they're buying them.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But at some point that demand for those Bitcoin to come in it's getting sparser and sparser right because people are doing something called hodling h-o-d-l and hodling means you're buying Bitcoin and they won't sell them no matter what and so if you look at what's cool about the Bitcoin chain is you can actually see who owns what wallet where you don't know who it is but you know those wallets from the beginning of time you can actually see that we call them the Satoshi coins have never moved And nobody knows who this person is.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Some suspect he's dead or she's dead or it's dead. But those original Satoshi coins have never moved out of that wallet because you can see it on chain. That's what's cool about it. You can actually track it, right? So what we know when we look at that chain is that those coins that were bought long ago, it's more and more people are huddling them. They're not spending them.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They're not saying, oh, I want to buy this and buy a house with it, right? Because throughout the culture of Bitcoin, there's like stories of a guy who, you know, bought a Bitcoin pizza and you paid like a thousand Bitcoin or something crazy like that for two pieces of pizza or whatever, two pizzas from Domino's pizza way back when, when the pizza was really gross.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Now it's actually pretty decent, but you know, now you look back, that'd be worth millions of dollars. Right. And then there's stories of these people who had these wallets and lost their private key and can't get those Bitcoin off the chain. You have one of those right? Where literally like millions of dollars are just sitting there. There's a guy in a lawsuit, I think it's in Europe. Do you have that one too? He's suing.

DANO WEIR: Spoiler. Okay, I'm not going to spoil it. Yeah, yeah.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So that became the risk of like, hey, if I lose my private key, I'm screwed. I'm not going to get these things off chain. They're going to remain dormant. We call those dormant coins, right? So if you think about dormant and hodling in 21 million, that's it. And these things are just getting more and more hodled.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Supply is getting smaller and And we have a saying in investment world is that price is set on the margin. So if price is set on the margin and that margin is getting tight and tight and tight, and say there's five of us in a room and only two of us now will even sell any Bitcoin, what happens to price? It goes up.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Supply went down. Demand went up. That's the recipe for price increase. And that's what you've seen if you pull up that. The value of Bitcoin over time. So first, if we look at price, this is the price of Bitcoin over time. And you can see from 2012 to 2022. Now, everyone will say that, hey, Bitcoin is super volatile.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You're going to lose your money, blah, blah, blah. It's a bubble. Well, actually, it's been following a fairly predictable pattern. Yes, it does go down, but price is set on the margin. And any asset, if you look over time, like Amazon, for example, Amazon throughout its history was cut by 90 percent twice.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But if you huddled it and kept it all through this time, you made a lot of money on it, right? So we see that these new innovative things, they have a lot of price volatility. That's a normal feature of it, right? That's risk. And you can see the price of Bitcoin has gone up over time. If you go back two slides.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You can see so i i just wanted to i put this slide up here to kind of poke the the naysayers and everyone says oh that dollar you know that that dollar is the only thing that matters and i said earlier in the show we're at 19 trillion now we're at 36 trillion five years later it took all of history of the United States to get to 2019 you have 19 trillion and in five years now we got 36 trillion that's a ponzi folk.

DANO WEIR: Don't quote me, 80% of the dollars in circulation have been printed in the last five years.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, something like that. Yeah, sounds right. So there's a lot of money. And so eventually this government, I don't know, is it 40 trillion? Is it 50 trillion? Is it 70 trillion? Is it 100 trillion?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Eventually we find out the emperor has no clothes. So if you're not thinking of what is my strategy if the dollar goes bottom up, you need to be thinking about that because it's a very real possibility. Right? That some recalibration has to happen. I'm not saying the implosion of the United States, I'm not saying the implosion of the dollar, but there is going to be a recalibration at some point.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And when that recalibration happens, how are you preserving your wealth? That's the question. Well, are you going to put in bonds? Well, let's talk about that and how bonds are the underpinning of the dollar. Are you going to put it in Starbucks? Are you going to put it in Amazon? What's going to be that place to preserve your value?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Are you going to take physical gold? Well, we've already talked about the downsides of physical gold. But maybe it's a little bit of different things. And that's the solution, right? That Bitcoin offers anyone is that it's a way to potentially preserve value. It's not a guarantee, but potentially preserve value in the event of the dollar no longer holding that value for you.

DANO WEIR: When you're talking about a recalibration, I just think of 2008 where you had a recalibration basically of the housing market. That's right. And of mortgage-backed securities. I mean, so you've already gone through that hole and you could see it on any chart.

DANO WEIR: Any chart you pull up with, they have another podcast with his business partner, Chris, on the markets. Every chart is like, what's that massive valley? On almost every chart, what's that massive valley? It was 2008. Right. Massive recalibration, right? Yeah. Basically, that's what it would be like.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's what it would be. And that's where Bitcoin came from was 2008 when everybody watched the government say, oh, we're going to print more money. And they said, oh. Wait, you can do that? Yeah, we can do that.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In fact, there's a great clip on 60 Minutes where Chair Powell, this is actually during COVID, and Chair Powell's being interviewed by the 60 Minutes interviewer, and he says, so when you guys printed all this money, how did you do that? Did you physically print it? And he says something to the tune of, no, we just added zeros electronically.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So anyone says that we don't have... Digital currency already just doesn't understand our banking system. If anyone says that Bitcoin's funny money, well, guess what? We already got funny money.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And what this is showing you is actually a much more predictable process in a fixed supply world where the government can't just print because they feel like they want to print. If you can go to the next slide. So when we look at, there's this guy called Plan B and people have pushed back and he was right and wrong and some, but he's created this.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A mathematical equation that basically has showed the process of Bitcoin and how price has gone up over time. And it's related to this thing called the halving that we could go into that forces basically the code is written such that it decreases supply internally over time too.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So it gets harder and harder to mine it as demand goes up. And that's what this model is effectively showing that as we get closer, which is by those colored dots to having effectively, we start to see price go up because supply has gone down and demand has gone up.

DANO WEIR: You've mentioned mining a few times. What is the mining? How is that happening? Are there people who are like, how is that? How does that even happen? Where are they getting it from? What is that?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: All right, so. When you were in math class growing up and you had a math teacher and you had like, I was thinking like Pillsbury, did he teach math? He didn't teach calculus. Yeah. He taught calculus. And imagine Twice.

DANO WEIR: Twice we've met Mr. Pillsbury on this.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We kind of like bring that guy in or something. But so Pillsbury.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Never had Pillsbury. I had his wife, but not Pillsbury.

DANO WEIR: There was a calculus teacher and the physics teacher at Casa Grande High School.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. So imagine him putting up a really long equation and saying, hey, anyone who can solve this math equation gets extra credit. And you go home and you'd work on it and try and figure out what that solution is.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And maybe that one kid that's super nerdy doesn't talk to anybody in the room, figures it out, and he gets extra credit. Normal dudes like me, like, I don't know how to do that, right? So that's effectively what these miners are doing. They're trying to calculate a very difficult to solve mathematical equation.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And the way it works is you've got hundreds of computers around the world, thousands of computers, and it's called hashing. And what they're doing is they're guessing what the answer to that equation is or that mathematical thing. But the problem is it's so difficult that all you can do is really guess.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But eventually, one of these machines is going to guess it right.

DANO WEIR: And then it gets a coin?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It gets rewarded with the Bitcoin.

DANO WEIR: So there are not humans sitting there with paper and pen trying to solve the equation? No. Forgive me if that's an offensive answer, but I'm trying to make this clear.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: There's literally guessing at this mathematical equation to see what-Mathematical equation provided by another computer. By the code.

DANO WEIR: The code, which is a computer, which is, where is that? Where's that server?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: On every node around the world. It's decentralized.

DANO WEIR: So the nodes keep the code alive. Right. Other computers are then miners are then going after it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. They're going after what the next block is going to be made by getting that equation correct.

DANO WEIR: Are there, are there, are there miners that are better than other miners? Like are there certain machines or code that's smarter? Is there advanced advantage in that space too?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So this is. This is NVIDIA, which is another stock out there that everyone's heard about out there. Many of our clients have heard about NVIDIA. Hey, did I have some of that NVIDIA? Part of what's driving their wealth is this race to create a faster computer chip that can more effectively do this guessing work.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Because every one of these miners has one of these really advanced chips in them, right? And that's what creates this heat. So it creates heat. So one of the other complaints about Bitcoin is it's... Not efficient, right? And that it uses energy.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so what happens as more computers, think about this, if we've got their equation in the middle, and if more computers are trying to guess that, and they're getting faster and faster at it, that does what it increases the hash rate. And when the hash rate goes up, that equation gets more difficult.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So as it gets more difficult to mine that or figure out what that equation is, what happens is the less efficient machines are not profitable anymore. So it propels advancing. It propels chip growth. It propels us, how can we make these chips work faster and more effective? It also propels cheaper energy, which is driving innovation in energy, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So if you think about it, like there's this story of this water plant. In, or a hydroelectric plant in New York and the hydroelectric, plant was not efficient anymore. Use of energy. And the reason hydroelectric is not very efficient is because you can't control, the power comes so consistently at you.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And there's peak times when you use electricity, that you can't control that. And it's just the same consistent. It's not efficient that way to keep the plants open. But what they figured out is we could take Bitcoin miners and connect them to hydroelectricity.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And anytime we didn't need that power on off peak hours, we could run them into the miners. And then the miners become profitable. All of a sudden hydroelectricity is now profitable for us because we can make money on the Bitcoin mining and then sell the power to the users of the power that run a warehouse or turn on lights at your house.

DANO WEIR: Crypto mining and data centers together accounted for two full percent of world electricity demand in 2022. They think that was in 2022 that was expected to grow by 3.5%. That's according to the International Energy Agency. That would be equivalent to the current consumption of the entire country of Japan.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So that fact's a dumb fact. And that fact right there was written for people pushing the agenda in the media because it did two things. It brought crypto mining together with data centers. Okay. And then tried to elicit an emotional response out of the fact. But the reality is these are two completely different things.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yes, they work together in a symbiotic relationship on some level, but data centers in particular are used by everything you have in your smartphone, everything on that TV, everything we do with this show is data centers. And so anybody that pushes back and says, Oh, data centers are taking energy.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's like getting mad at an oil company and then driving your car down. Like, come on now, you're using the data center for your thermometer in your house that stores your data to tell you what your life cycle of heating that house is. Like that's data center usage. Okay. So whoever wrote that was an idiot.

DANO WEIR: And second, the International Energy Agency, I'll let them know.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You let them know that they're just trying to elicit a spot. They're pushing propaganda and an agenda. Now, cryptocurrency, I get it. Like it takes energy. To mine a Bitcoin, but so does mining gold. So does making any other kind of energy or doing any type of other economic production.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But it's the power that's demanded by the Bitcoin blockchain that protects the blockchain, that keeps it safe from people trying to take stuff that's not theirs. So it's serving an economic function and it's serving an economic system that can remain trustless and decentralized. And so for that- It is what it is, but it's a power well spent and energy well spent.

DANO WEIR: You just made me think of something as I think maybe an analogy, pictures. So when we were growing up in the 80s and the 90s, when you take a picture, that's a moment in time that we've transferred to a piece of paper.

DANO WEIR: And we would protect that piece of paper because that was that moment and it will never appear ever again. And you could even say the film, right? Even if you're going to get it redeveloped, like that's it. That's all you got. Well, now. You don't have any paper anymore.

DANO WEIR: All of your pictures live on Google Photos or whatever cloud service you're backing them up on. And think of all of the energy that it's taking to continually keep those pictures and those moments alive. Whereas before it was just click and you're done and it's up to you to protect it. That's cash and crypto right there. Right.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's it. I mean, it's the same thing.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's providing an economic value. So people attack and say, well, why do we need this crypto thing? Well, I'll tell you why. Because the government's inflating the dollar away on all of us, right? If you put your dollar in the bank and think you have a dollar, the same dollar you had five years ago, you're straight delusional because that dollar is not worth what it was in 2019 at 19 trillion.

DANO WEIR: Milk is $6.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Right. Your gas is more expensive. Everything is more expensive. The only things not expensive are the things that are being subsidized to try to get you to buy something that is inflated, right? Like Home Depot sells their. Plywood really cheap.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So you buy their nails and their screws that are twice as expensive as they were previous just to get you in the door, right? Gas is even being subsidized. Why is gas being subsidized? Because if you don't, if they don't subsidize it, we're unelecting everybody, right? So there are products in the economy that are subsidized so that we don't overthrow.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's just reality. So that dollar is worth less than it was five years ago.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And if you look at what's happened to a Bitcoin in five years versus what's happened to a dollar in five years, it's a very different story to be told.

DANO WEIR: So he is Darren Bitcoin Blonsky.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So let's not go that far.

DANO WEIR: They you must just you work with clients all the time. So you must just shove Bitcoin down their throat. You must just think that every single person. Right. That's what you do. Right.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, as any professional, you have to separate your personal beliefs from your professional beliefs. Right. Like there's not you can't.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I don't go at every client and say, you must own this. But I say, look, there's a case to make it a part of your portfolio.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And this is not financial advice, but there is a case to be made for owning some Bitcoin in a portfolio in a judicious way. It would be irresponsible not to at this point.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so we try to encourage people to look at it as a potential asset class along with gold, along with stocks, along with bonds, along with commodities. It is an asset class at this juncture. Right. And he believing anything different is just buying into some other propaganda. That's crazy.

DANO WEIR: I'll share where I'm coming from, both when I came into this episode and even now after this great explanation you've given me, which is that this has been my revelation working at this company, similar with cinema wealth advisors and working in the financial services industry.

DANO WEIR: Everything is backed by the full faith and credit of belief.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah.

DANO WEIR: Everything. So every company that you own a piece of paper that says you own a piece of that company could in fact disappear. That's right. It's based that that piece of stock that you own, which by the way, isn't even a piece of paper anymore, is backed only by whether that company is going to make it or not.

DANO WEIR: That dollar that you have is only backed by whether you think the u. s government is going to make it or not right and you can laugh while you say that but there are governments in the world that have not there are currencies that have failed many many times so the it's so funny that the us dollar used to be backed by gold because that just made people feel so good and it's like why is that piece of paper worth anything because it's backed by the shiny metal which is clearly worth something like that's a double layer of belief there so i don't own any Bitcoin but i understand what you're talking about and it to me it just comes down to okay what is the room decided is that we're going to be using to play monopoly with we're using we're using the monopoly money or is there new monopoly money should.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I have a little bit of both you know which which is it well in in to that point there was i think it might have been episode like two we did where you did with Chris and you talked about the tulip craze yes right Like that in a point in this world existence, a bulb for a tulip was worth a lot of money.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so part of being an economic participant is trying to understand what the collective agreement is about what value, what is of value in this world. And that's what you're after when you're an advisor, when you're a investor, it's trying to figure out what is the collective agreement say that is what is of worth.

DANO WEIR: If we're going to talk about Bitcoin, we got to have some laughs. Let's do it. Because there's a couple. And you made reference earlier to it. I want to talk about the Bitcoin in the landfill, because this is James Howells in the United Kingdom had a hard drive with 8000 Bitcoin on it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: What it had on there was not 8000 Bitcoin. It had the private keys to 8000 Bitcoin. Bitcoin. So you've learned that today. Was it the actual Bitcoin?

DANO WEIR: Because that lives on the chain. He has the keys that would get him access to his coin. So there's another 8,000 that are unavailable for ETFs, right? That's right. Either he or his girlfriend, depends on which story you read, accidentally, but she says he told her to.

DANO WEIR: Doesn't matter. The hard drive ended up getting thrown away, which ended up in a landfill. And so the value at the time when it was thrown away was $7.5 million. And now it's estimated to be worth 150 million worth of Bitcoin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I think he's actually suing the city to get right to excavate that.

DANO WEIR: Correct. So the city is Newport in the United Kingdom, and he's even offered to give them 25% of the Bitcoin in exchange for the ability to just go find it. He even thinks he has the spot in the landfill where it will be. And they say it's an environmental hazard. So he's fighting the city basically to dig his Bitcoin out.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's because the mayor's digging at night.

DANO WEIR: Right, right. Okay, here's another story. This is Stefan Thomas. He's a German programmer living in San Francisco. This is the early days of Bitcoin. He does some computer work for a client. And the client says, hey, I'll pay you in Bitcoin. And so he takes 7,000 keys to 7,000 coins.

DANO WEIR: Very, very common thing. Who hasn't done this? He grabs a small piece of paper. He scribbles down the password. Doesn't really think of it. Think much of it.

DANO WEIR: Paper disappears. He forgets the password. In 2011, he starts testing what he thinks might be the password. It's on something called an iron key device.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And you get three guesses.

DANO WEIR: This says 10.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: This one's 10. Okay.

DANO WEIR: This is 10 attempts. So he has 10 attempts to guess this password. He's used eight. So he has two guesses left on his own password for this Bitcoin. And the estimated value right now is 190 million. Wow.

DANO WEIR: So there's all the, that's, those are all stories that, I mean, you know, probably make the news in Bitcoin more than some of the things you've told me today. But what I thought was really funny is, you know, that's the story, kind of the line on Bitcoin in general. Like, oh, billions lost.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Oh, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

DANO WEIR: Who would ever store value and then have it be completely gone? And I said, you know what that reminds me of? That reminds me of a shipwreck.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Right.

DANO WEIR: This is just one example from the past. It's 1708. The Spanish treasure fleet is trading goods and stockpiling all their payments that they get in return on this ship, the San Jose.

DANO WEIR: Off the coast of Colombia, they're ambushed by four British ships, four British ships. 98% of the crew dies in the ship. And all the payments fall to the bottom of the ocean. The ship is full of gold. It's full of emeralds. And it's worth an estimated $17 billion.

DANO WEIR: And... We always try to bring up historic events on the show to try to show perspective. This shipwreck, the San Jose, sitting off the coast of Colombia, by the way, the Colombian government thinks they found it. They're going to try to raise it.

DANO WEIR: This is the same as that Bitcoin hard drive sitting in a landfill. It's just something that everybody agreed had value and they tried to protect it. And through one way or another, it got lost or damaged or destroyed. And now people are trying to dig it up or it's gone forever.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But here's the thing, what naysayers are saying is. The equivalent to saying Bitcoin's junk, they're saying it's the equivalent of saying that gold was junk because it got lost. Like just because someone forgot their keys doesn't mean it was junk. And I think that's what people have to work through.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that was my point in the beginning of the episode where it's like anyone who I've talked to that's a naysayer on Bitcoin actually doesn't know what they're talking about and should dig further on this facts of the situation. Because anytime I've ever... Debated this, talked about it, discussed it, analyzed it, listened to audio about it. The people who may say it just haven't taken the time to understand.

DANO WEIR: There are that class of people that just anything that's new is bad because I don't know what it is.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. But don't consider the facts.

DANO WEIR: But you have to, to their credit, there is a lot of new stuff that comes up that is baloney, right? So a branch of this was NFTs?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Correct, yeah. Well, that was on with the Ethereum chain, which is a whole other story. But that was like the-Branch of crypto is NFTs, but not necessarily Bitcoin.

DANO WEIR: Right, but that was the attempt to do, to basically use the same type of blockchain.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Blockchain technology.

DANO WEIR: For art.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. A different code set.

DANO WEIR: Now not a thing?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: No, it's a thing. If you look at the price of NFTs in the last few years, or in last- six months to a year, they've gone up considerably, but it goes up and down wildly. Right. And, and there's, there's more to be said about that.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But that's why you've created these, what we call Bitcoin maximalists over time is because there's been so many scams and pump and dumps and et cetera, FTX, which everyone knows about that have created this negative energy around it. But just like anything, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Right. And just like any new technology.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I agree there's a lot of junk out there and you should and anyone should absolutely question whether or not something is has veracity but if you start asking that and answering the questions from an honest perspective that's the rabbit hole i found and then i'm like this is interesting we need to consider it as an asset okay but there are a lot of other scams associated with crypto absolutely for someone who wanted to learn more what should they do call you?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah. Well, I would say just, there's a lot of books out there that are really great. I would start reading those. I would be careful about the internet, be careful about YouTube, I'd be careful about X, you know, and go in with a very skeptical eye because there are a lot of people that are prepared to take your money.

DANO WEIR: Yeah, I've seen this a lot on my feed, on my socials, my personal socials, is people are, oh, I got certified to do whatever it is that they're sort of, I'm so excited. I worked so hard for this. I worked. Four weeks for this. So what, what are those? What, what is, do you, you're familiar with those or these are just people who.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I don't know what you're referring to directly, but, there, there are people that go out and portray excellence and understanding. I, I even in my own acknowledgement, there's so much to understand about this world and there in this particular topic, I could spend all day studying and not understand everything.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So I think it's just, you know, you need to look for trust. Worthy sources to understand it, but be skeptical and understanding because there's a lot of people that have ill intentions.

DANO WEIR: New territory for us.

DANO WEIR: Darren's been waiting the whole, this is the whole reason he started the podcast. He wanted a Bitcoin episode.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's an exaggeration.

DANO WEIR: Did we get your phone out? Did we hit 100,000 before the end of the episode? Let's see as we wrap this up. So if you're new to the show, make sure you subscribe to our channel. We'd really appreciate that wherever you are, whether you're on YouTube, Apple Podcasts. We are Sonoma Wealth Advisors in Sonoma, California. You can learn more about us at SonomaWealth. Com.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And 98,959.

DANO WEIR: But maybe by the time this episode premieres.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right.

DANO WEIR: Thanks so much.

DANO WEIR: Thanks so much for checking out. It's all money.

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