Just because you put crypto on top of an idea doesn't inherently make it good.
But in a bull market, that will be the narrative. We have
crypto on top of our AI idea, or a metaverse idea or a game
idea. Therefore it has evaluation that's insane, and markets will pump because the
liquidity is scarce and height gids really big and all this sort of stuff.
But metaverse is a very interesting area and I think it will be very big,
and we will see crypto integrations even in the big ones. You're listening
to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you just can't
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Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your
free newsletter and gift. Financial Survival Network now more than ever, And welcome
you are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
Terry Lutz. Hey, t you know, I've been involved in the crypto
space for years and years already over a decade. I wish I had kept
my six bitcoin that I got when bitcoin was six hundred bucks a coin,
but I didn't, so, hey, what can you do? I think
I sold it it seven hundred dollars a coin and felt I admit a killing
and such as life. Well, person you're about to hear from makes his
living off the crypto space. But he's not like any other of our crypto
experts you've heard from before, is very down to earth. He's he's got
a newsletter over ninety thousand subscribers that in itself tells you everything you need to
know. His name is Lark Davis Lark. It is great to have you
on the show. Hey, so I got a question for you. You're
in the crypto space. You didn't you weren't a kid saying gee, when
I grow up, I want to be into cryptocurrencies. Probably didn't even exist
when you were a kid. How did you get into the space? Yeah,
it's a great question. Well, a lot of what I do didn't
exist when I was a kid. You know, I was born in at
the mid eighties, so growing up in the nineties, we just got internet.
I remember getting TV back in the day, right, those were many
times of the internet. Ah, yeah, back in the day when he
had to somebody had to be off the phone in order to use the Internet
at the same time. So my age here crypto has been a very exciting
space and making content and crypto has been an absolute pleasure to do. Lots
of challenges of course along the way wild but I got a new crypto content
creation around the same time that I got into crypto investing. So I started
investing in crypto. First bought my first big coin, bought my first old
coins, and then I said, what's next? How do how do I
get more involved in this space. I started going down the rabbit hole learning
about things, and I found this application which was called the Steam blockchain,
and basically it was an early social media platform on the crypto space. Posture
step there, people up money, yeah, do you remember. So I
started posting articles over there and did okay, and I started really getting into
the idea of doing it. And of course anyone that I posted on crypto
got really popular over there and got nice up votes, and so I started
doing more of that content because I was super interested in myself, so why
not. I started answering the questions of people are asking over there and trying
to dig dive into these topics myself and one thing led to another. I
was like, man, it's taking a long time to write all these posts
out. I'm just going to start recording videos to share my thoughts that way,
YouTube channel started taking off. Of course, as I hosted on YouTube,
one thing led to another, and I didn't necessarily start out as I'm
going to create a big business out of this, which has become now the
newsletter and the course sales and everything else that we're doing across the space,
and we're making industrial levels of content right now. We're doing one hundred and
forty four shorts a month posted across eight different social media accounts, and we're
doing twenty live streams a month and twenty long form videos a month. Like
we're tracking out content of course now at the time. But it never started
off with the intention of going in that direction. But the more I got
involved in the space and the more I got sort of red pilled on crypto,
I decided that's it, this is what I wanted to do, And
in November of twenty seventeen, a month before the all time, I quit
my day job, went all on Crypto twenty eighteen. I started questioning that
decision during the bear market, of course, but I said, no,
this is this is going to be big. Bitcoin is that going away?
The crypto space is not going away. This is a once in a lifetime
opportunity. Akin to being early to the Internet stuff back in the nineties or
the early two thousands, I said, I got to go allut of this,
and this is what I've done since then, going all in on crypto.
I love it. Great story, A so state of crypto now,
Bitcoin, Ethereum, few others. I mean, why do we need twenty
five hundred different cryptocurrencies and they're not currencies, but that's the name they've gotten.
It's a great question. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are relatively superfluous,
but we're also seeing huge competition. Now we can really break things down.
We have Bitcoin, which is in its own unique category essentially, and that's
a whole conversation of itself. But we start looking across the rest of the
cryptocurrency space. You have early movers, You have things like Ethereum and the
ecosystem building out around that, and you have competition to be number two,
three, four, five. They might look at the smartphone space and go,
well, Apple makes iPhones and they're great, So why would we need
any other iPhone or any other mobile phones. People like choices, right.
My guess is that we're probably going to have four or five within a decade,
we're going to have four or five blockchains that capture ninety percent plus of
the users in value. In the cryptos space, We're already starting to see
winners starting to form up. Doesn't mean new competitors can't come in and make
a big impact and be one of the big ones, but in general,
we're going to see a huge consolidation of money and resources into a very small
space in the crypto area. A lot of blockchains will fail. We've already
seen the vast majority of blockchains that have come out over the years fail.
I could brab all kinds of names. In twenty seventeen, the people thought
we're going to be the new big thing, and nobody talks about them anymore
because they fail. They fail, but the users they fail to get adoption,
they failed. The applications built on the meal see saying think it happen
as people iterate new ideas, New infrastructures being built all the time. New
technology is advancing all the time in the crypto space, so there is legitimate
use case for some of these new things that are coming out, some of
these new data availability networks and stuff like that. There's a use case for
that. There is an important level of infrastructure adding to crypto for that.
But then you start digging even deeper into the crypto space and you see,
do we really need fifty perpetual swap exchanges on chain? No, we don't,
and we don't need to have five on every blockchain and every layer two
that exists out there. But again, we're in a very competitive phase right
now, and whoever wins from wild or leaf phase will be the winner exactly
wild West stuff, and there'll be big winners out of this and huge losers.
All right, So let's go back here like NFTs. We're all the
rage. Is there any freaking purpose in this world for an NFT of somebody's
song or artwork or whatever that doesn't even give you any rights to use it?
Well, NFTs are a very interesting thing, and they got way overblown
at the height. Obviously, people were buying monkey pictures for a million dollars.
Things got a little bit out of control here, guys. But the
NFT technology is actually a revolutionary technology because what we're talking about is verifiable scarcity
and digital ownership on the Internet. I always like to use the examples like
baseball cards or something. If you could have a baseball card on chain that
you know, okay, there's only five of this particular baseball player and that's
one of the ones that I have, and you can verify that. And
as we're seeing nowadays with the actual baseball cards, spots, fakes and stuff
are coming out. They're really hard to identify, and so it's becoming a
problem in the baseball card and magic cards and all these things sort of world
now profile pictures and stuff like that. It's a much trickier area because it
really depends on, okay, what culturally takes off within certain niches of the
market, and things like crypto punks for example, because there's such a legacy
set in the NFT space, people are willing to pay one hundreds of thousands
of dollars for those, and people in crypto have such stupid amounts of money
that they will pay for that. But that's just sort of the surface level
of NFT technology. We start diving down into its huge applications and like the
gaming space, for example, being able to own your in game assets and
trade them and have proof of where they've been. Okay, John the famous
video game player played with this in this big video game tournament, and I
want to own that because he's selling it now and I can own that piece
of history because it's important to me, which may not be important to us,
but it's going to be important to somebody. And then we go to
real world applications, well, real estate deeds online, something like one in
three people in the world can't prove they own their property. Well, they
always been a big blockchain, So that's vote. Yeah, that's authentication of
data and authentication of assets. Hey, so what about the metaverse? Does
that metaverse work with any of this stuff? Or is the metaverse just a
figment of the sucks imagination? Well, the metaverse is real and scary,
and Apple Vision pro makes me worried for my children growing up in this world.
I want to see them when they're adults, not have been plugged into
the metaverse. I won't know. There's my kids in the metaverse, but
unfortunately might happen. Hopefully, hopefully we're just screen time enough that them become
massively addicted to technology like everybody else. But hey, a tough battle to
fight. Look NFTs in crypto and metaverse, it actually all comes together.
And again, as we so much see in the crypto space, a huge
amount that we're seeing is overhyped bullshit, people over promising, under delivering,
failing to get users. Just because you put crypto on top of an idea
doesn't inherently make it good. But in a bull market, that will be
the narrative. We have crypto on top of our AI idea or a metaverse
idea or a game idea. Therefore it has evaluation that's insane, and markets
will pump because the liquidity is scarce and height kids really big and all this
sort of stuff. But metaverse is a very interesting area and I think it
will be very big, and we will see crypto integrations even in the big
ones like metabirds is on Facebook will have some kind of crypto integrations. We
saw a lot of these big social media platforms already experimented with n FT integrations,
and there'll be token integrations and all this kind of stuff. But be
careful because again we don't need one hundred metaverses. Yeah. You know one
thing that I was like disappointed in when Facebook was going to come out with
its own coin and it would pay its vendors in that coin and collect fees
in that coin. All that that I thought was really going to sweep the
world. And then the I think it was Janet Yellen who was then I
think at the FED head of the FED shot that down and all of a
sudden that idea was gone. You think these things are going to come back,
You think you have a Tesla coin and a Google coin or whatever.
Probably, in fact, that was such a bad decision by Janet Yellen because
one of the interesting things is that stable coins, and what Facebook was proposing
was a stable coin. So essentially Facebook was proposing was to make the biggest
social network platform in the world become the biggest bank in the world for the
US dollar. And they're so dumb in Washington that they couldn't see this is
a massive wind for us. We're going to extend the dominance of the dollar
by decades here because everybody is Facebook. Everybody's even paid ten dollars on Facebook,
and it's gonna be huge for us. Instead they shut it down.
It was a massive win American company with an American dollar stable coin, biggest
social media network in the world. Dinosaurs on Washington just couldn't see it.
Yeah and yeah, in their logic for doing it made no sense. You
know, money laundering, nobody tracks you more than Facebook. So every coin
that was going to be generated would easily be traceable and whatever else, it
would give them a way way head start and maybe even eliminate the need for
cbdc's. Yeah, what had a kill switch attached to it, it would
have been perfect. Not that I'm not a big fan of it, but
you know, from the perspective of the government, it would have been a
perfect tool. But they just can't see it. There so stuck in their
ways of banking. Extra prastructure from the nineteen eighties works great, guys.
Well you got a tech to settle a reserve, which is by the big
banks. Yeah. You know, you go three times where they're latently furthering
the interests of their shareholders, and then other times where it's not as clear.
But they always do have that in mind. They always serve for their
master So what about cbdc's. CBDCs are scary and they're coming without a doubt,
Make make no mistake, they're going to bring them. And I know
there's been some China has gone a Yeah, China's already rolling them out.
They've been testing them for years, and it's got to become very mainstream there
very soon. And all I have to ask to get people to understand the
terror of CBDCs is do you trust your government? And almost unequivocally the answer
is know. So, if you don't trust your government, then why would
you give them a tool they can shut off your money at any time?
Why did you say something wrong on Facebook or where your social credit score plunges
for no reason that you know of the as you know, right, you
flow on a plane so many times this year. You're not allowed to buy
any more plane tickets because we have to perfect the environment. Sorry, yeah,
right, You're not allowed to buy this bottle of vad today because we
think you've been drinking too much this month. And if that sounds crazy,
China is already doing it. If you're not going to roll it out in
the West, then you haven't been a thaying attention. Yeah, it's definitely
a means of tyranny and the who knows, maybe it's the mark of the
beast. You know, in the Revelation it said that in order to do
anything, you would have to have a number, right, and oh maybe
it's it. Everyone's got everyone's going to have a number. You know.
It's interesting too about cbdc's we think about the very high level stuff, like,
okay, they can turn off your money. They already can do that
to some extent. But turning off your money is just the tip of the
ice. Right. They can immediately text your money, so they take tax
out and just immediately straight into the government coffers. What about this? What
if they set expiry dates on your money? Exactly? We're that Gary.
So if you have ninety days to spend your money, so you have to
spend it, you can't save The deal is like economy is not doing good,
so they say, hey, here's one thousand dollars worth of CBDC,
but you got to use it in the next thirty days or try and stimulate
the economy guys, right, you know, and just the the means,
the nefarious possibilities that it opens up, you know, it's going to be
rolled out a crisis too. Yeah, So what you're feeling is about precious
metals. Is that a barbarous relic or does it still have a role in
our digital world. It's interesting. I've got gold and silver. I like
precious metals. I enjoy the collecting aspect, like in the coins and the
bars. It's fun. Sure that being said, gold compared to bitcoin,
for example, has been a massive underperformer. And if you like gold,
then you're really gonna love bitcoin because it's got a lot of the same properties,
just with more volatility. It's an earlier assets, a younger asset,
and you think about the general use cases for why you're holding gold. You're
holding gold because you want to protect your value, and bitcoin also protects your
value with more volatility. You can't look at a day to day, week
tweak month to month even you have to understand a multi year period on it.
Any of the bitcoin that I've bought in basically the last seven eight years
is in profit now. Sure, and I know we've had a big run
recently, but even recently, even when the price was at like thirty thousand
dollars, I was still in profit on my bitcoin because I've just been consistently
adding to that position over time, and it's got a lot of features that
make it more interesting, of course than goal. We know the verifiable supply
a bitcoin. We can send bitcoin anywhere in the world. Try to take
a ten million dollars of gold across a border with you good luck, good
luck. It's got to be a hard take ten million dollars in bitcoin easy.
Hey. So, so you know, the government has these restrictions like
if you have you can leave the country with the ten thousand dollars or more,
but you have to report it, and if you don't and they find
out, they'll confiscate it, and it's a whole mess. But with bitcoin,
you just have your wallet, and hey, your wallet's accessible wherever you
are, so it really impinges upon the government's potential for control. There's other
aspects I don't want to get into it now, with the nodes, the
weakness of the basic bitcoin architecture that makes it possible for governments to do things.
But we'll say that for next time. In the meantime, Lark,
how do we find you? How do you subscribe to your newsletter and Twitter
and all that good stuff. You can just find me. Look up Lark
Davis on YouTube or Twitter. You'll find me. Make sure you get the
verified account on x A lot of imverse stayers out there, and you want
to check out our newsletter. It's a great Alpha pac newsletter. We try
to get you as much news and air drop info and NFT info and all
that kind of stuff, you know, depending on your risk levels in the
space, every single week. You can find it at the wealth master io
all right, and the link to that is in the show notes to this
interview on Financial Survival Network dot com. So just go there and click it.
While you're there, sign up for your free newsletter as well, and
Lark, been a total pleasure, really. You know what I really like
is I can see your understanding of the crypto space very deep, very profound,
and yet you're able to express it in bite sized nuggets that many of
you out there are looking for but can't find someone who has the ability to
do it. So, hey, I'm a subscriber now. I suggest everybody
out there subscribe. Go for the premium, not that much money, it'll
definitely be worth your while. I think this is one of the best ways,
Lark to keep track of the space in ways that people who are not
technically oriented, who you don't have the technical tools to understand all this is
really a plus. So appreciate you coming on any questions, comments kl at
Carrie LUTs dot com. We will get you an answer quick. Lark,
we'll talk to you again soon. You're a regular on the show. Now,
thanks for stopping by, Thank you, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's
Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest,
go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever,