Speaker 1: That is absolutely the loftiest prediction that I've heard. But
the point, the underlying point in there is they're talking
about an omni caandle.
Speaker 2: It's like a god candle where it is going to.
Speaker 1: Travel in traverse sideways and there's going to be this
moment where everybody decides, oh, Saudi Arabia got in, Mexico
got in, Brazil got in, and these numbers. It will
become a race, a form of competition to establish dominance
in this new ecosystem.
Speaker 3: You are listening to Carrie.
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Speaker 3: And welcome.
Speaker 5: You are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network.
Speaker 3: I'm your host, Carrie Lutz.
Speaker 5: Hey, I was just on this gentleman's podcast last week
and we were both in about the same generation or
both the into crypto big time. His name is Chris Berlin. Chris,
great to have you back on the show. You find
him at Chris Berlin dot com and any questions or
comments shoot me an email kl at Carrie Lutz dot com. Chris, Hey,
you're a bitcoin enthusiast, proselytizer, missionary, whatever other terms you
want to use.
Speaker 3: How did you begin this journey? You know, it's.
Speaker 2: Interesting, you know, I mean, uh, let's go with the truth.
Speaker 1: My introduction into crypto was to buy drugs on Selk
road full I'm at the time we were.
Speaker 3: As a statute of limitations run That's what I want
to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean yes, I mean one would hope, so,
one would hope.
Speaker 3: So but.
Speaker 2: Listen, I'm old.
Speaker 1: Enough where I you know, I wear I wear, I
wear socks and slippers.
Speaker 2: I don't care anymore, you know, like if you he'd
like it. That that's how it is.
Speaker 1: But the introduction was was buying buying drugs on the internet.
And at the time we went uh to Brooklyn and
there was a guy and you could buy bitcoin and
you bought it on a spreadsheet, a piece of paper,
and you gave this guy money and he gave you
an address and he said, okay, you a bitcoin, and
you're like, what just happened? And you will go log
into this dark web website and you put in this
code and put whatever you want and it worked.
Speaker 2: And I think.
Speaker 1: That's where this term magic Internet money came in. And
it was it was brilliant, and it's a un fortunate this.
I mean, I was a kid, and so we were
experimenting with drugs and technology at the same time, and.
Speaker 3: I'd not necessarily in that order.
Speaker 1: Huh perrect excuse me, And a bunch of time passed
and I got away from Crypto.
Speaker 2: I did not stay a part of it.
Speaker 1: I did not circle back to Crypto until kind of
the digital art narrative stepped in toward the end of
nineteen or excuse me, twenty twenty and into twenty twenty one,
when it really started.
Speaker 3: To pick up.
Speaker 1: That brought my interest back into it. It became the
first equalizer I had seen for up and coming artists
to be recognized in the moment for their artwork and
get instant exposure to an audience that there was impossible
before this blockchain movement.
Speaker 2: So I thought it was really interesting.
Speaker 1: I was a touring music for years and in Hollywood, California.
It got to a point where it's interesting and I
lost my train of thought on exactly where I.
Speaker 5: Was going with the musical, all right, but how you
got into bitcoins? So suffice it to say, you got
in uh where it's illicit applications, buying drugs on the
on the internet, on the dark the dark web once
upon a time. But now like bitcoin's done to one
to eighty, it's like totally legit. Here you got the
biggest names and finance in the world getting involved in it, ETFs,
you got options all this, and we've got the you know,
for those of you are not aware, there's only a
couple more million bitcoins that can be mined before that's if.
And you know the other thing, Chris, is that like
twenty five percent of all the bitcoin that's been mined
so far has been lost.
Speaker 3: It's floating around there like uh.
Speaker 6: And and to that point, there is also I think
still the largest holder is the Satoshi wallet, the creator wallet,
and it has never moved, so that people look at
that as part of the story and lore that is
locked up forever.
Speaker 1: So that's that's it's really interesting. Oh, let me get
back to the music real quick. Yeah, I'm playing music
recording records you are taking advantage of by the record
companies period.
Speaker 5: Your manager, Hey, your manager, everyone right, it's the business.
Speaker 1: So it's part of being an artist is that middleman
is saying, hey, I can give you the exposure, but
it comes at a price. They have the key to
the door of exposure. Enter the blockchain and as an
an artist, you can now put your art on the
blockchain and you have instantaneous exposure to every art officionado
that happens to also be on the blockchain. So it
became the first means to enter this new arena with
no middleman. And even more importantly, if you decide to
sell your artwork, whether it's music or digital, and you
can even connect physical works to digital NFTs and sell those,
we can talk about that too. But you're dealing with
the collector. And this is where it's absolutely brilliant is
if a collector collects one of your art pieces, it's
in their digital wallet.
Speaker 2: That's probably going to be the same they'll have forever.
Speaker 1: Now as artist, I never lose contact with that collector
In five years, if I decide to do a collection,
I can look on chain and say, hey, this person
still holds my artwork in their wallet.
Speaker 2: I can look to see where my artwork.
Speaker 1: Is I can decide, Hey, I'm going to send each
of you my new artwork before I put it on
the market. So this connection, it comes through the blockchain,
there's no middleman. It's one to one. It's a game changer.
That's what, in my view, crypto brings to everybody. And
it's unfortunate that it got started on the silk road narrative, right,
but it has done a one eighty and we are
about to have a president step into power and he
is going to reinforce this narrative that it is no
longer something that is filled with deceit. We also have
people like Elizabeth Warren that, in my opinion, she throws
anything she can at crypto, child pornography, terrorism, drugs, whatever,
anything that will stick, and it's just smoking mirrors. It's
smoking mirrors. This crypto revolution, in my opinion, is here.
We are on the infancy stages. And you can gauge
that by the financial advisors that still do not offer
it to their clients. We when the door is so
close to opening, it really is.
Speaker 3: All right, So what do you think is coming next? Here?
Have a pre call.
Speaker 5: We were talking about the potential of the one analyst
saying eight hundred thousand dollars bitcoin by the end of
the twenty.
Speaker 1: Five That is absolutely the loftiest prediction that I've heard.
But the point, the underlying point in there is they're
talking about an omni candle. It's like a god candle
where it is going to travel in traverse sideways and
there's going to be this moment where everybody decides, oh,
Saudi Arabia got in, Mexico got in, Brazil got in,
and these numbers. It will be come a race, a
form of competition to establish dominance in this new ecosystem.
Speaker 2: I think many are waiting for.
Speaker 1: It's almost like price confirmation, where you're waiting to make
sure it.
Speaker 2: Goes up to buy this.
Speaker 1: Before this, I've been screaming at friends and family since
thirty thousand dollars this cycle, please buy this, and you
can't convince them to buy Now that it's one hundred
and seven thousand dollars. Those same people are saying, hey, Chris,
should I buy this now? You should have bought it
at thirty thousand dollars. But yes, I think it is
a sound investment. And the other narrative that people don't
understand if you're not cryptosavvy is people think, okay, bitcoin
is one hundred and seven thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: I can't afford that.
Speaker 1: If you can afford to put ten dollars into big
so you can buy any amount of bitcoin you want
at any time. If you have a digital wallet, you
can go to coinbase and turn ten dollars cash to
bitcoin in a second. You could do that every Friday
for the next two years. It will change your life.
Ten years down the road.
Speaker 2: Ten dollars every Friday will change your life. I'm telling you.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 5: So what about other cryptos? Some of them are nothing
more than kleptocurrencies. There's thousands of them out there. What
about ethereum It's lagged Bitcoin to date. If Bitcoin's going
to eight hundred thousand, what is ethereum going to?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: It's interesting, I do not so. In my view, ethereum
is the tail of bitcoin. How far that tail goes,
it's been consistent. What's interesting and important now is when
we look at technical analysis on cryptocurrency and bitcoin in particular,
we have just moved into a cycle that we can
no longer look back upon for chart patterns or analysis.
It is a brand new paradigm for the next three
to four years. When you throw in to the mix,
which nobody intended or calculated at the time, the ingredient
of artificial intelligence and how that is going to propel
us to work faster, smarter, quicker, more efficiently. Mix that
into cryptocurrency. The shift is going to be drastic. And
AI doesn't want cash AI. There are AI, So there's
a bunch of interesting stories and narratives where somebody created
an AI robot and gave it a wallet and said,
we're going to give you an account on X we
want you to go tweet a token and build hype
around it.
Speaker 2: And it's action.
Speaker 1: It's this robot has made millions of dollar on this
token and it's an interesting story. It's hilarious. It's is
it vaporware? Is it part of this mean cooin cycle
that people are saying is going to just disappear?
Speaker 2: We can get into that, but yes, I do.
Speaker 1: Think Ethereum is the backbone of decentralized finance. A Theoreum
has a bad rap at the moment because there are
gas fees, which they call it gway. So every transaction
on ethereum, some if it's a busy network day, you
could pay two hundred dollars in a gas fee Solana Swy.
Speaker 2: They do not have those associated fees.
Speaker 1: So the ease of use for some of these newer
blockchains have made Athereum less less less fun to work with.
In the short term, Ethereum has upgrades that are coming
down the pike. It is the backbone of decentralized finance.
Nothing will ever change that. So the fact that the
light is not on ethereum right now people are talking
about and buying bitcoin at the highest price it's ever been.
Speaker 2: I think I love a theorem right now. I think etheroeum.
Speaker 1: I think we definitely see etheroeum in the eight to
ten range by the.
Speaker 5: End of twenty twenty five, all right, so it coin
will have gone up eightfold from where I do.
Speaker 1: Is no, So I know that that's the that's the
that's the I love to entertain both sides, right. The
highest prediction I've heard recently is eight hundred thousand dollars,
and it's worth noting because it comes from somebody that
knows what they're talking about.
Speaker 2: And these are all right, we're moving.
Speaker 1: Into a cycle that we've never been in, so why
not go on wax and make a prediction, and why
not why not call it eight hundred thousand dollars to
get on everybody's podcast and become you know what.
Speaker 2: Can You could be wrong, that's fine, but if you're.
Speaker 1: Right, oh my goodness, think of the next four years
of your financial clients who called bitcoin at eight hundred.
I mean, those stories are really interesting. But I just
this narrative isn't going anywhere. It's not going anywhere. And
what's the most important part about this, I think is
oftentimes giant narratives like this change from the bottom up,
meaning the youth, as they gain power and get into government,
they begin to change the narrative. Crypto, we are having
the head of the free world step into power and
say this is going to be king.
Speaker 2: That's what's just happened. And it's huge. It is huge,
It truly is all right.
Speaker 5: Well, so yeah, we got bitcoin for addictions for two
thousand and five. Tom Lee predicts two point fifty K. Scaramucci,
he doesn't know anything, predicts two hundred thousand, one hundred
and eighty K.
Speaker 3: They're all over the place here. Who are you going
to believe?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think that what I do know is that I
look at the social movement right like charts are finding
stuff the social influence.
Speaker 2: When when friends and family that know him in.
Speaker 1: Crypto, when they begin to text me and email me
at one hundred and five thousand dollars bitcoin and say, hey,
should I be buying this right now?
Speaker 2: Right enough?
Speaker 1: People that are outside the loop of crypto are starting
to knock at my door. It hasn't happened yet, wait
till Trump gets in the White House.
Speaker 2: So one of the interesting things is one of the
promises he made on day one of his presidency is
to free ross Albright right from Silk Road, the founder
of Silk Roads.
Speaker 1: So he's doing a life sentence and he's a he's
a programmer, and yeah, like there's an interesting backstory. It's
well worth doing some research on because the narrative behind
it is it's it's it's it's history, and it's there's
some there's a great story in there.
Speaker 2: So I advise everybody to check it out.
Speaker 3: So what about the prospect.
Speaker 5: Now, this got killed during Obama's administration when pretty much
Zuckerberg said that Facebook was going to issue their own crypto,
they'd pay all their vendors in it, they would re
accept it as payment. And I think it was Janet
Yellen who said no, no, you can't do that, and
that was killed. But that's coming, isn't it. I mean
Tesla will have it. Every major trillion dollar company will
have its own cryptocurrency, right.
Speaker 2: You know that's a that's an interesting narrative.
Speaker 1: I think, yes, I think I don't even believe it'll
be trillion dollar companies. And so to give you an
example today, there's there's a mechanism and it is called
pump dot fund and it is a place where people
go to launch mean coins, some mean coins that you
may have heard of recently, moodang.
Speaker 3: Just to find a meme coin listening out there?
Speaker 1: Yes, just so, so this is this is really interesting.
So we have we have the major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana,
those they call.
Speaker 2: Them the majors. They've been around for a minute.
Speaker 1: Next, we moved into digital art and NFTs as this
new treatable asset, and it was fueled by speculation and
collectors liking art and.
Speaker 2: Deciding there's value in this and it. If you guys
have ever heard of the artist people.
Speaker 1: He was He's the highest paid living artists of all
time period. So he brought all of his art into
the digital realm and his collection had sold at Southeby's
I mean, he's is very famous artist and he shed
a lot of light on digital technology and he created
this NFT boom, and when cryptos started to fall, because
it's cyclical, the NFTs kind of fell. And around that time,
mean coins came in. And a mean coin is a
digital tradable asset just like any other cryptocurrency, but the
market cap begins at zero. So individuals are bored and
they want to gamble in essence, and they will go
through the Internet and they will find a meme. And
a meme is any picture that instantly makes you laugh, giggle,
right right, So this culture, right, the kids of today,
they live on the means everybody, I mean your phone emoji,
that's a meme.
Speaker 2: That's a that's a meme.
Speaker 1: So you find these memes and they give it a
funny name, and they create a token and they drop
it on the market and all of these other people
in cryptos see it and they're like, oh, that's funny,
I'm gonna buy this, and they get in super early
and some of these tokens go from zero to a
billion dollar market cap in a relatively short amount of time.
Is there any value behind it? There's nothing. It's vaporware.
It's it's a mechanism that people are using to gamble with,
But people are doing it. People go to casinos, people
play rolette and slot machines. It is no different. It
is the digital version of that. So when we talk
about how many coins have been minted today, and when
I say minted, I'm talking about the number of new
cryptocurrencies that we're created in the last twelve hours, twelve thousand,
four hundred and five new cryptocurrencies have been created already today.
So this is whether you like it or not, whether
you believe in digital assets as a thing. When we
look at a number like that and the volume we're
talking about, just to give you an idea, in the.
Speaker 7: Last twenty four hours, we're talking about three hundred and
twenty million dollars worth of volume in the last twenty
four hours for this new gambling mechanism that's in its
infancy stage.
Speaker 3: So it's who wants to be left holding the bag here?
Speaker 5: You know, you could definitely become a bag holder, right.
Speaker 1: Instantly people buy these things and you get absolutely wrecked.
The win loss ratio for participants is about one percent.
It's you have better odds going into a casino with
the same amount of money than you do playing this
mean coin game, and then.
Speaker 3: Get better odds in the casino.
Speaker 1: You know, And then you think that most of these traders,
they're very sophisticated. They're cryptosavvy, they have trading bots, they're
using algorithms. They have been creating code their entire life,
and now that there's this vehicle where they can put
their coding skills to work in this digital world. It
is a new world is emerging and the force of that,
that part will come from the bottom up. It's great
that Trump is going to advocate for crypto on the whole,
but the younger generation, these kids, what do kids do
that are in grade school or high school?
Speaker 2: Do you study for your.
Speaker 1: Your SATs to go to university or do you dial
into the computer and learn how to become a wonderful
prompt engineer. That's not even a thing anymore. You're going
to have your own artificial assistant. Everybody is, and it
will be you'll buy this assistant like you buy a car,
and it will.
Speaker 2: Look through all of your social paths.
Speaker 1: It will get to know exactly who you are, how
you operate, what you think about, and it will become
your best friend. It will look at your past life
mistakes and figure out, oh wow, this is when he
went off the rails.
Speaker 2: I see this behavior. We're going to start.
Speaker 3: When did you meet my wife? Here?
Speaker 5: This is my ex wife. This is exactly what she did.
That's why I got rid of her.
Speaker 2: This but you know these are going to be malleable.
Speaker 1: These Hey, I'm done here in your lip, not anymore today.
Speaker 2: You can tell me to not eat sweets tomorrow, but yeah,
screw off today.
Speaker 5: So that's dat all right, man, lay This has been
a blast, Chris.
Speaker 3: We'll definitely have you on again.
Speaker 5: It's good to have somebody in the similar generation I
could relate to here because we're outliers. May my best friend,
oldest dearest friend. A couple of weeks ago, he told
me I think he was in an ETF or a
bitcoin ETF. He told me his holdings up to eight
hundred K. So now he's got to be a one
point two or three million and is like in a
matter of weeks here, you know, and I kind of
I've been buying it, but I didn't do the ETF
thing because I just thought it was a scam.
Speaker 3: But now it's real. It's all about all.
Speaker 5: The Wall Street getting in there is trying to stop
from being cut out as an intermediary because they get
their three percent and throwing enough money into this in
hopes they can manipulate the price, just like they do
to the price of gold and silver and every other
commodity in the world. But the problem is we might
be they might be out game stopped on this one. Chris,
just tell us again, where do we find you? How
do we connect with you on the web?
Speaker 2: Chris Berlin dot com.
Speaker 1: My handle on x is beatbroker and my substack is
beetbroker dot substack dot com.
Speaker 5: All right, the links in the show notes this interview
on Financial Survival Network dot com. And we just urge
you when you go there, please sign up for your
free newsletter like so many like over sixty thousand FSN
community members have done already. And if you've got a question,
comment for Chris myself kl Atcarrie lets dot com.
Speaker 3: Chris, been a pleasure. We'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 2: It was awesome. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network.
Speaker 3: Now more than ever
Speaker 1: K