[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Crypto Talk Radio, the podcast for everyday investors like you. Visit us on the
[email protected] and now here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Thank you for that, Bailey. And welcome everybody out there in Crypto Talk radio
[email protected] I work technology, but I really can't stand technology. I gotta be honest. I was stuck in a conference all week.
I did a presentation today. They requested and almost to a T. Not exactly, but almost to a T.
Regarding all of the people that were coordinating the conference.
If they were female, I couldn't stand them.
I don't know what it is, but almost to a T. The females were absolutely infuriating.
Whether they were boring, whether they were dry, whether they were rude, whether they seem like they just didn't want to be there.
They. I go down the list. I don't know what it is. It's a different era. The one I'm used to with this organization because I work with them before. I, I've done this before where I presented.
It's a different era and I get it. And then I had to argue with this other idiot who comes from the era of this is the future.
And I had to level setting things that worked work. That's why the government had to scramble to find cobalt developers. Because it doesn't matter what's legacy, there are still solutions out there that use some of these. Mine's not cobalt, but I'm using that as an example.
Anyhow, I'm done with that garbage. We'll talk cryptocurrency as we are rolling into spring. The rain is coming down and we are getting somewhat warmer weather. And the red has never been more prominent than it is right now.
Coinmarketcap.com we will zoom out to the month chart. Start with bitcoin because I have some slightly good news. I don't know if the good news will last, but I'm going to share the slightly good news.
Bitcoin seemed to recover somewhat. It didn't fully recover, but I am seeing an upward trend. Finally, after quite a few days of what seemed to be a concerted push downward.
This does not confirm that I'm right.
Right now, just shy of 70,000 bucks. It did get over 70,000 was on Route 72. We came back down again. Somebody else, they estimate it was going down to 60.
It's still in. It's still in play. That's still possible. But I looking at it, it's. It seems like there's more strength pushing up than down. If we were to go down, I'm going to figure no lower than 62. But I could be way off rocker because I did tell you last time that somebody had said they were looking at 30,000 and I seen like, it's like, if it did, I'm on it, but I found it hard to accept.
Although Bitcoin doesn't really have a true bottom, and that's true.
I felt like in the short term, 30 was extreme.
Right now, I don't see anything close to that drop unless there was something staggering. A lot of shifts happened, you know, the price of oil, the, the Iran. And everything seemed to calm a little bit.
I think the, the decision against Kerry Lake with Voice of America might have had a small part to play in some of it. I think, Christine, no, I'm getting you fired. I think that played a small part of it. So I think a lot of this is kind of all coming together to where certain catalysts are changing sentiment with respect to where money's going, but not full scope.
So that's what I see, at least for bitcoin. Looking then at Ethereum.
Ethereum appears to be following Bitcoin very closely. But Ethereum seems to have a slightly less powerful upward trend that it has a greater risk of going down. And if it does go down, it wouldn't go too far before going back up again.
So, in short, it's possible we're out of the worst of it.
However, we're not quite at tax filing season yet, which is April 15, so we have to see what that looks like because there might be more dips yet to come in the future for cryptocurrency.
I'm going to talk about one topic today because I think it's important.
It's something I mentioned before, and it's one where I just. I've got to spend some time on it in order for people to try to wrap their head around it, because I don't know that people fully understand when I talked about it before.
And so it will be a short episode simply because there's not a lot going on there. There's stuff going on, but not things you didn't already know. And this topic is going to take probably the majority of the remainder of the episode.
The remainder of the episode focuses on NASDAQ, more specifically, something that originated from NASDAQ's awareness of, finally, awareness of a gap in what's referred to as tokenized stocks.
You've heard of tokenized gold?
Sure. Xaut, you've Paxis Right.
You've heard of tokenized real world assets.
Tokenized stocks have been a thing for a while, but there was a problem.
People were trading them simply purely for the money aspect, the profit. If you've not done stocks, you may or may not be aware that stocks in their core nature confer, look it up, certain rights, voting rights, a stake, a percentage of ownership. That's what the whole point of stocks was, is it reflects a portion of ownership of a business entity.
If you tokenize the stocks, well, what's the gap? The gap is that the token does not confer, look it up, those rights the same way as the stock.
A little bit of history.
In the olden days, an actual stock certificate, physical document was issued to you and it reflected a portion of ownership, a share of ownership, and you held a certain number of shares. Certain companies that were going to go public later would issue options.
The options would allow you to then claim shares.
The share literally is a percentage of ownership. Keep in mind there are tons of shareholders. So your share might be infinitesimal, look it up. Or it might be non sequential, meaning I purchase, then I don't, and then I purchase again and my percentage has gone down because it's averaged out because a bunch of people became shareholders in between.
So between when I started and let's say it was a 1%, let's say I go three years and I buy in some more.
Now I'm down to 1% because a whole bunch of people jumped in. That's why I say non sequential. It's not a straight up increasing amount, steady increasing. It's not consistent, it's not guaranteed. And you have to measure how much did you have at which points sequential matters.
Was it full stake ownership upfront or did you kind of piecemeal it over time?
And critically, this only applies when it's direct stock, not the representation of stock stock. So if you trade ETFs or other types of asset classes for which they are a bundle of stock, you don't own the stock, you don't have a claim of ownership. As a result, you don't claim voting rights as a shareholder. You've heard all these terms.
The gap becomes obvious. The tokenized stock never gave you any of these rights. It never entitled you to do this stuff because it wasn't intended to. It was simply intended to provide you a basic level of exposure on the token side to the profit.
NASDAQ wants to change that. They'd like it to where the token, if it's a tokenized stock, confers the same rights, voting rights, proxy and otherwise, as you would have with stock.
Now, I want you to really wrap your head around what that means before you start cheering. It means there's has to be control.
Because in order for the stock market to work, there has to be aggressive oversight with respect to the stock issuer.
There has to be an administrator that has to oversee all this stuff.
The valuation of stock, the company oversight, there's regulatory scrutiny, the books. Right.
There's a measure of control and oversight that has never been the case in cryptocurrency.
So you try to understand how it's possible.
You can treat these token assets as anything close to the stock market.
And you understand that it's nigh impossible unless if you turned the token assets into a variation of the stock market. Well, if you do that, and for some that's been listening to me for a While at CryptoTalk FM, you heard me say, yep, they want to put on halting. It's only open during banking hours. You can't trade it this way because NASDAQ's not open after a certain hour and holidays, it's closed. And they have the volatility crud. You understand why I said that?
I said that because that's their end game. Their end game is to turn it into nothing more than the same thing we have with the stock market, because in the minds of the people doing the trades, they believe they should have the same rights and access as they would if it was the stock.
Now, I don't agree.
First of all, I don't agree with tokenized assets, but I don't agree that they should have the same rights as a stockholder, primarily because when you do that, if you're going to say that this cryptocurrency makes you a shareholder simply because it is equated or in some ways paired to the price of a stock.
Now you're diluting that same stock right now with trading off cost. It doesn't dilute it. You will dilute it, though, with when you start extending shareholder access to a pool of people who their only exposure is on the cryptocurrency trading aspect.
So they know that.
They know that the dilution is a risk. So they would have to mitigate the dilution in some way. How do you mitigate dilution? You control distribution. That rhymes. You say this can only be acquired through this controlled means, and you can only have so many of it and it can be seized from you and its value is controlled and managed by this oversight.
Well, then let's say they do that.
What's the difference in that versus the stocks? None.
If there's no difference, what's the benefit? None. If there's no benefit, what does that do to adoption? It tanks it.
Then they say, well, see, look, we tried. I mean, we adopted the crypto and people didn't want to do it because you put barriers in front of it that completely contradict the spirit of what cryptocurrency was meant to be.
Which is why I was never a fan of these tokenized asset classes that we saw.
I'm not suggesting this is a real thing or will be a real thing or guaranteed or any of that. I'm saying that the narrative has now shifted such that what they're trying to do is equate the value of one to the other side. And I don't see that that's a strong, logical, fair connection in my lens. I would rather see we treat cryptocurrency as cryptocurrency, treat stocks as stocks, and let markets decide.
I understand there are people who want to be able to trade against that value, value, but they don't want to be beholden. Look it up to the rigor that the stock market has. That's the whole reason the assets exist.
They don't want to have the rigor, they don't want the oversight, they don't want the control. They just want the money aspect of it. Simple, easy breezy. They're trying to use cryptocurrency in a way that doesn't have any sort of limitations.
If the NASDAQ gets its way, it's going to impose limitations you didn't want. So then it's going to kill adoption of it. It's a logical result, right? We would think so. I'm not suggesting for a moment we do nothing. I'm simply saying that I believe we should let the market choose.
But if you choose to go crypto to benefit financially, you do not get any trading rights, you do not get any voting rights, you do not get any proxy rights. You have no rights. You are not an owner. You will not be an owner. You will not be a shareholder, you will not be a stakeholder, you will not be a voter. You have no rights. If you choose the crypto side, take your money and play in the sandbox. If you want to play with the big boys, you come under the regulatory scrutiny, and this is what it is. That's what I would like to see. Will I see it? Probably not.
That's what I would like to see. At some point that we grow up and simply let them be separate assets, independent assets, the benefits being different on each.
One is flexible and free, but has no rights. Other has infinite rights, but is ultimately restricted and locked down by the irs. And you choose not both, because I didn't talk about the IRS or the crypto side. Cryptocurrency is already subject to IRS scrutiny, but they don't have real visibility into it. They have to trust you in an honor system to tell them, when do you bank major amounts of money? If you subject it the way the Nasdaq's talking about, the IRS would have to have access to that data so they can properly tax you for capital gains. So be careful what you ask for. For those cheering what the Nasdaq is suggesting, just be careful. And you're like, I can duck those. No, you can't. If it's all subject to that scrutiny and the oversight that I talked about, you're not going to get away from that damage.
Some may not care. I'm not a criminal. You can say that, that's cool, but that's not the point. The point is you already have an asset class that lets you do it. The stock market's there. Use the stock market. If you want to benefit off that and you get the value of being a shareholder, that's where you need to go. Leave cryptocurrency alone and stop trying to pair it to the stock side unless you're willing to just trade it as a, you know, like a pegged asset. Nothing wrong with a pegged asset. But we should not be trying to encroach on the other side because you're just going to force the regulation that none of us really want. Not like that. You don't want halting, I guarantee you. You don't want a world where the, the dang price of the thing doesn't change after 5pm that's crazy. But that's what you would get because NASDAQ's not open 24 7. Crypto by itself is, but Nasdaq's not. If you let it be subject to those rules, it's no different than the stock. And it's just as limiting and just as frustrating.
It's up to you, but I don't think that's what you want. You may, may think you do. They think it sounds good. I don't think it's really what you want. It's whatever.
In closing, because as I said, it's a short episode. In closing, we have a number of things on the horizon. When I say we, I'm referring to the market in cryptocurrency. That rhymes. There's a number of things on the horizon, some of them good, some of them not so good.
But the bottom line is, when we look at where we wanted things to go and where Trump said they were going to go, I don't think we got any closer to it. I don't. I think we actually went a little bit further. But it's not Trump's fault. Specifically. What's ultimately going on is you were subjected to a pump, a pump that was triggered off of sentiment. The sentiment was triggered off of statements made about what cryptocurrency's future would be. We're. We're not fully out of Jerome Powell's era yet. We're closed, but we're not fully out of it yet. You need some of that. You need the prices of homes, the price of homes to be more lockstep with reality. Whatever that takes. You need rates, damn sure go down. That needs to happen. You also need a fixed tax system. The tariffs are under attack, the terrorists being under attack. Some people said that if the terrorists got reversed, it would spike crypto. That didn't happen. If anything, it made it worse.
Why? Because of the lofty promises made that the tariffs would allow a world where we didn't need to have income tax, no income tax, more money in your pocket. Did not happen. Since it didn't happen here we are, we're looking at prices that are somewhat suppressed, not because Trump did anything wrong, simply because statements were made, promises were not kept for a variety of reasons.
I can't tell you what to do. I can't give you any direct advice other than to suggest that if it's true, and this is speculation, if it's true, that bitcoin's going to start spiking and now hit a new high in the 200 thousands or 300,000 or 400,000 range, as some people are throwing out there.
The worst you could do is buy a little bit in there and then sit on it.
Da Vinci, Jeremy claims that all you need is 0.1 Bitcoin at the current prices. That's just shy of 7,000 bucks invested in it. And it's gonna make you set. Well, one number he threw out there, let's say 300,000. So that's a 5 or just shy of a 5x from where you're at. So $35,000. For some of you, $35,000 is life changing, right? It's. It's life changing. But then in the same breath, he would say, well, you shouldn't sell it. So then you could borrow against it. Absolutely.
If you borrow against it, you're still beholden to the Fiat system. I'm not trying to discourage you. I'm saying that I don't see anything's much better unless bitcoin did go down to like a $30,000 range.
When. If it were to go to a $30,000 range, now you only need $3,000.
Now it might 10x.
Now it's 30,000. Right. And that 30,000 off the 10x or 300,000. That 30,000.
But it was less for you to have to put in to get to that point versus just what feels like a simple possible double or whatever. I'm saying we need to have a lower price of cryptocurrency in order for it to make a bang.
It has to go further down to make a bang. If it doesn't go further down, it won't make a bang, at least not from your lens. It's a lot of money to ask to put in for what is essentially minimum gain, especially if you're not going to be selling it. And if you're going to borrow against, it's fine. But it's still a lot of money up to, you know, if you had that much money to put up front, you wouldn't need to borrow. Right? So I said, if it was 30,000 bitcoin, I could justify getting in at that point. I can easily do it now. I could easily put the point one, but I wouldn't borrow and I would put stuff on hold just to write it out. But I don't know what the future holds short term.
I'm really looking for it to go down further.
Let's say it doesn't go down. Let's say it goes up and runs up again, which is possible. But let's say it runs up again.
I've kind of accepted, just because of my position, I've kind of accepted that cryptocurrency is one of those that hits these tumultuous periods. And I just have to make a decision. And I've been okay not heavily investing in it.
I have the ETFs, I have two of them, and they're fine. The Fidelity one's down. I could DCA into that one. The bitcoin one, I'm still up, believe it or not, I'm still up because I got in at the very bottom price of that darn thing because I knew what upset what was happening. So at worst, I would just simply probably double the fidelity one, which I might do, so that it. Because I know it's going to run up again. That one's definitely going to run up again.
And it's a safe asset and it's insulated from a lot of what's going on otherwise. And then on the Bitcoin etf, which I do have, I can borrow against that one if I really needed to.
So I've kind of. My point is I've kind of settled on safe assets, precious metals always, as well as the ETFs. They really can't steer me wrong. I'm kind of less on the crypto side because it doesn't feel like the industry wants to adopt it.
It feels like the industry wants to control it, which we talked about. And I'm not looking forward to it if it's just going to be controlled because it's no different than what we have now at that point.
I'm not telling you what to do necessarily. I'm saying I made the decision to focus less on it. Doesn't mean I don't have any. I have some, but I don't focus heavily on it because I don't see that they're steering it the right direction, which is it should have the freedom it was always designed to have, not be restricted like the current other side. Because if it's going to be restricted like that side, I might as well just stay on that side because it's really no better than what we already have.
Sam.
