[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] Ooh, child. Things are gonna get easier, although I'm not really sure how much easier. I'm not really sure what we're up against. I'm not sure what's in store for the future. I will share what I think, and all I can say is it's what I think, it's what I believe, and it's very well possible that I'm wrong.
So just to put in perspective, I am going to be talking today about some high level economy things. We're not talking specifically cryptocurrency. I'm just high level economy because I think it's worth doing a little bit more digging into just high level economy as part of the show to give a little bit more well rounded look at the bigger picture and other things that are happening that I'm not really sure what they mean, but I can tell you what I'm confident in, that's that it connects to cryptocurrency in one very specific way. That is the flow of money from A to B to C. So I'll be doing that part of the show today. I don't have much on the personal update, one note, I'll just say some people didn't take profits, and apparently there's tokens that are being outed as scams, which doesn't surprise me. And I'll just say, if you listen to the show, by the way, welcome. Thank you for being here. But I'll just tell you, if you got ripped off by something, all I can say is this is why you have to learn.
You can make money off scams, but you're gambling. And if you gamble, and you're okay being a gambler, as long as you admit it, you're good. I would want people to be a little bit more studious and controlled and managed and measured about what they do, but I can't tell you what to do. So, big picture now, we have a lot of things on the horizon and a lot of things coming. Good things, very good things, but also some not so good things. And it's the not so good things I want to talk about for the first half of today's episode, I'm going to talk about inflation again.
Inflation rate cuts, the prices of goods and services, job markets. All of these have a downstream effect on what we may or may not get in cryptocurrency. Why? Because money availability, discretionary income contributes to the run. If we don't have a lot of it, the run is stalled. The run doesn't go as quickly as we might want or doesn't last as long as we might expect.
I want to make sure everybody wraps their head around that. It's not just this garbage token spins up, buy and sell and move on. There's a whole chain of consideration, and some of this you may even be affected by and don't realize it. And that's what I want to. I'm hoping that I can get you thinking about as part of your strategy. When I say strategy, I'm talking whatever that strategy is, whether it's garbage tokens or the core ones or anything, I just want to share information to more enrich, enrich your process. So as you make these decisions, you are more informed going in. And I'm going to apologize for one thing. There may be people who listen to the show or who used to listen to the show, and perhaps we're hoping, because I noticed on YouTube there's a lot of people that they're just looking for somebody to tell them, just tell me what to buy. I'm never going to do that. And I'm just level set because we may have new listeners. I will never just tell you what to buy.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: And I believe people who do that.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Are irresponsible, not because they're malicious, and some of them are, but the vast majority are not. They're trying to help out, trying to point you in the right direction.
[00:03:50] Speaker C: But the thing is, what I've learned.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Is you're going to be stronger by figuring it out yourself.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: As in you do the search, you do the research, you check the tokens, you look for fundamentals, and then you make a decision.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: And not just ask random people, strangers, us, all about what to buy. Because what that's doing is, it's giving you a scapegoat. Because if it craps, then you're going to come back to me or us or whoever and say that we're the ones to blame. You want to deflect the blame. And see, I'm not one to do that. I understand that's what you would want to do. You'd want to deflect blame. That's why I don't do that, because I'm not going to give you that power. I'm going to empower you to know what to look for beyond that, it's on you. And I'm hopeful there are people out there that respect that and they appreciate that, and they'll spread the word that.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Hey, this guy's trying to help you out.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: He's not going to tell you what to go after.
[00:04:44] Speaker C: He's not a shiller.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: But he'll give you some solid advice on what to look for so you can make up your own mind. Given all that, and I didn't want to depress you, but given that, let's.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Get into cryptocurrency, shall we?
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Okie dokes. Let's check some numbers. Coindesk.com. Zoom out to the month chart. Let's start with Ethereum. Ethereum looks a little bit more fun to talk about. So still in the green, still trending upwards, still positive, still buy pressure, but we had a little bit of a drop, nothing major. A low of 38 three, a high of 4000 hovering around the just shy of the 4000 marks I recorded held the line very nicely. Bitcoin, same thing. It was in the green. Very solid, very bullish. General there was a lot of purchase pressure for bitcoin, mostly around the ETFs. A low of 68 eight, a high of 72 nine. So it had a little bit wider of a spread, a little bit hovering right now just around the 71,000 mark. Solid, still poised for another run up. There will be some sell pressure along the way. People are going to be taking profits, as I expect that you should do as well. So that's the numbers. Now on the numbers, there's not an issue. Total market cap of $2.68 trillion. We lost a little bit, but not enough to be worried, at least not in my opinion.
I want to talk about something that was brought to my attention. I haven't validated, proven, vetted, confirmed any of this. I'm just sharing it in case you're in it for something to look for. Pepe 20 is one of those garbage tokens, and it's on the Ethereum chain. And it proceeded. It came after Pepe, it came before bonk, it came before all the other garbage ones. But it came out and it's been heavily manipulated since it launched. It was obvious that there was something weird with it. There's chatterings that Pepe Tuo might be a honeypot. Now, I scanned the contract. I didn't see that it's a honeypot. I can't prove it. I'm not in it. Didn't plan to be. I made a little bit of profit on it a long time ago, and I could sell it back then, but I can't say for sure whether it's a honeypot now. I do see volume. People seem to think that this is like buddies of the devs or the devs themselves. I cannot say I'm sharing it, because if you're in it, my call to action to you would be to test whether you can buy and sell. More importantly, sell. And as long as you can transact, it's not a honeypot. And before the diehards, and I don't know if there's diehards in this, before diehards try to hit me like they did on Tatano, that's a call to action. Can you sell? It's that simple. Can you sell? If you can sell, it's not a honeypot. There is a tax, and I think it's like a 3% tax. So it may be that people are not saying the slippage, I don't know that. But that's my call to action there. This applies to any token. If there's some other token that's got sketchy business, just make sure you can sell. As long as you can sell, you're good. And I would still implore you not to leave your crypto in any one of these garbage. Make sure you take profits, take profits when you make a run, because number one, you earned it. Number two, you don't know what's going to happen with the devs. And number three, sometimes these projects, they're trying to take your money and you can't tell until it's too late. And I wouldn't want that to happen to anybody listening to Michelle. So that's my summary on that one. I'm not going to go any deeper into it because I'm not going to do any sort of swag or coverage on it. It's not really worth it.
I refuse to do that.
Big picture now, let's talk about Ethereum. Ethereum. So there's the level ones, level twos, right? Layer zeros, and all these other ones around Ethereum and everything. And Ethereum is doing the upgrades. And the expectation is that the upgrade will contribute to lower gas prices across the board for layer twos at least. So one of the reasons that people jumped so far into Solana is because Salana has, number one, cheap gas fees. Number two, it's fast. It's really fast. It's really quick. Transactions are lightning compared to other tokens that are out there. But some of that steam has kind of died off. We don't see nearly as many people jumping into the salad of tokens as we did before. Myro is certainly running, bonk's still running, but they're not as heated as they were before. That's not saying they're dead. I'm calling out that when I saw all the stuff that Ethereum's doing, I said on one of the previous episodes, at the end of the day, we have an opportunity with Ethereum for it to go on a major run. And the Solana was kind of a short, I don't want to say fad, but it was for now, and it was going to die off because Ethereum still runs the roost and bitcoin is still always there. But ethereum, I thought, was going to be the go to. And that's what seems to be showing me. It seems to show that Ethereum is still the king. And we're going to see people run, come back over there. So be careful. If you did get into Solana, if you're going to be in, be in. But I question whether those are long term.
Speaking of Ethereum, then hex, if you're in the hex pulse ecosystem, and I know there's some people that listen on the YouTube side that were, and I've never covered hex, and unfortunately, this was brought to my attention, it was a little disappointing. Not surprising, but a little disappointing. But Richard Hart, he apparently sent a post down social media and he was telling people, why are you trading on Ethereum? The gas prices are out of control, which they are. I've called that
[email protected]. I said, the gas prices are ridiculous. Again, we're talking like $100. I think with hex it actually is $100 or whatever. Slippage is nuts. Everything is just crazy on the Ethereum side. And he was saying, he's saying the true hex is on pulse chain, not the ethereum one. So he basically abandoned it. It's not a rug pool because you still trade it, but he essentially abandoned it. It caused a major dip on the Ethereum hex side, and people were pissed off because it's like, dude, come on, why are you fighting our bags like that? Mind you, hex is also on polygon. Polygon didn't dip nearly as much as the Ethereum one did. So I'm going to give my thoughts on this. And please, I'd love to hear from anybody in the ecosystem, cryptotalkradio. Net, and hit the contact form from my experience, and I went through this and I battled it, and I finally got it sorted and I got my money back. But the problem with pulse chain is the barrier of entry getting on there. I know they're like, oh, pulse X. Trust me, I went on it. I transitioned money over there.
That went fine. When I tried to get money back, I ran into all sorts of issues.
I eventually got it sorted out, but I was forced to basically delete the wallet and re add it. Well, the wallet is attached to your ethereum wallet, so it's the same wallet address. So I basically have to reset my whole Durham thing just to get the damn thing to work. So that's a barrier of entry. And the other thing is, there's not a lot of swaps, there's not a lot of bridges, there's not a lot of participation on the app side on pulse chain, so you don't have a lot of options. Uniswap yanked hex for regular trades. And there's no bridge other than their own bridges that they offer on the pulse chain side. So I like the concept of what they're trying to do with the self hosted bridge.
[00:11:51] Speaker C: It's basically you host the bridge on your own.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Like you can actually run your own node that does your own bridge on your own computer. I like that concept. I'm saying that there's too many fundamental issues with getting in and out that make it really difficult to support it.
I'm not wishing them ill.
I think that it needs more work. And it's not had the level of focus and attention necessary that contributed to some of the down pressure that we saw. With people being pissed off, saying that he's fudding the bag because people were all in on Ethereum. Remember the Ethereum one's all over the exchanges. I'm pretty sure there's very few exchanges that have integrated pulse chains. That's the other problem. If all the exchanges are supporting polygon hex and Ethereum hex, but not pulse chain hex. And you got Richard Hart saying this stuff, it's a barrier of entry. You're not solving the underlying issue. Now, I haven't gone to every single exchange. It's possible there's some out there to support pulse chain, but from what I saw, the vast majority did not. So that's going to nerf the ability to get this thing off the ground, just like with shibarium. Speaking of shabarium, there's this bad idea AI, which apparently is aligned with the Shib ecosystem, but not part of it. Just like trees, just like what used to be Ryoshi's vision. All these other ones are aligned, but they're not really part of the ecosystem. I don't have an opinion. Yay or nay? I will say that Shitoshi and the team, they keep screwing up. They're not supporting the Shibarium blockchain success.
Because if you go back and you think about Pulse chain's rise when it first was announced and leading up to its launch, and then the couple months after the launch, it had some issues, but it feels like pulse chain, they dedicated more energy to stabilizing it, making it usable. It has way more volume now. I think the adoption was just way higher, in my opinion anyway, than what Shibarium is doing. Shebarium keeps talking about these NFTs and I don't think they're appealing to people. And I think it's hurting the price of the damn thing. Because there was apparently binance, as in binance.com did a thing for binance futures and said, do you want us list bone Shiba swap? And people were saying, vote, vote, vote. And I'm like, number one, Americans can't vote because we're blocked off the damn thing. And number two, think about it. If the exchange really wanted to list the damn thing, they would list the thing. That's what happened with Pepe. Pepe Binance didn't ask to list Pepe. They just listed it. So binance is playing games. And I speculate, and I don't have any definitive proof and I don't make a statement of definitive facts, but I'm saying, I speculate that Binance is possibly triggering a little bit of pump and dump with what they did, as in, we're going to go and do this thing to try to pump this dude, and then when people dump off of it, get a lower price, they'll sell.
I can't say for sure. I'm just throwing shit out that I believe they could list the thing if they really wanted. It's a gas token. And I said, the fact that none of them are doing it tells me there's some sketchy business going on. I can't say for sure. I'm saying that's what I see.
Spot bitcoin ETFs are skyrocketing. There's a bunch of bitcoin being replenished and added to the pools. Inflows are skyrocketing, increasing. If you didn't already, I had recommended as part of a diverse portfolio that you consider the spot bitcoin ETFs. Now the price is at an all time high and it's minting new all time highs. So you already missed the low point on all of these? Pretty much. But I still think there's value in having it as a form of stability in a diverse portfolio, if you can get access to it as part of something that you're doing, like a 401K or an IRA or something else.
So be mindful of if there's that opportunity to do that, please. I would consider that you do that. I think it's for the best in the future, long term, for financial stability, not for the quick million. You're not going to make quick million off that business, at least not in my opinion. Let me talk about the news on the inflation side then.
So the theory is that we're going to have another round of skyrocketing inflation and that this is going to cause some price uncertainty. Across the board, people had said, including the president, that we pretty much tamed inflation. We haven't tamed inflation. The inflation is out of control. What you may not understand is inflation is a domino effect.
So the US dollar is integrated in the international side.
Any inflation that we have here, printing, printing, printing that devalues the asset, devalues other currencies that are dependent on it, which contributes to their inflation to some degree. Not as much as we feel, but there is some downstream impact to other countries when we have excessive inflation on local shores. The other piece to consider when we have excessive inflation is there's less money for you to spend, aka discretionary income. Lower discretionary income means you have less that you're willing to throw at something like cryptocurrency, even though you might, in your mind, feel like it's a good investment. If you're just now getting in it, all you see is green candle. But if you were in it from way back yonder, you already know we're nowhere near the days where we jumped and doubled and jumped and doubled. We're past that now. We do climb, but it takes longer because more people are in it. It's out there, more widespread. It's not the same era as it was before, but more importantly, the value of the money that you put in, it's not going anywhere near the same.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: Strength as it did before, because before.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Your money went a longer way.
[00:17:31] Speaker C: You're talking like 20 10, 20 11, 20 12, 20 13. That four year span, your money went hella further. That was fresh off the tail end.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Of the bubble bursting in the housing.
[00:17:43] Speaker C: Markets after the bubble burst.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: That was right at the start of when they started printing money to too big to fail for the banks, but it hadn't fully taken yet. The impact of all that printing hadn't taken yet. We were still at a base in terms of the value of the money that hadn't inflated yet. So your money went further. But there was not the strong realization of where cryptocurrency was going to go unless you had the foresight, like Mr. Sagala, who was on the show, to get in it at an early stage and kind of sit on it and nobody sat on it because they weren't sure what was going to happen. And then bitcoin did its fork, and then the fork kind of devalued it to some degree. But then if you were smart enough to kind of just hang on because you believed in this stuff, that's the rare slim few. Right? So the Silk Road assets that the government seized, those skyrocketed, obviously, because those are some of the earliest forms of the currency. Well, when they go back on the free market, the government even said they're.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Going to sell them at a loss.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Because they just want to sell them.
[00:18:41] Speaker C: Right. That's going to have some depression in terms of the price, but it's going.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: To jump back up. People are going to scoop those like crazy because it's going to be perceived as a dip that people are going to buy because they don't think that this bull run is going to stop anytime soon. I believe that the bull run is going to have a couple of speed bumps when we realize what's happening with the shipping of money overseas, the increasing inflation, the lead up to the election, and Democrats turning against the president, and all these other things that make people nervous. And then you think about businesses that are likely going to start laying people off. Come here soon. You got to think about the big picture of what all this means together. In a big picture, it means we're going to have some hard times ahead of us. And my message to you, the timing of what we're in now, all of this, the inflation, the impacts, the international, all of this, the biggest thing I can tell you is this is the time for preservation of assets. What do I mean, preservation of assets? I'll give you an example, real world example for myself. When I need to preserve assets, I do two things. First, cash on hand. I keep cash on hand in a place. I keep cash on hand at all times. Fact, I need to run down to, because Wells Fargo is the only ATM around here that gives a thousand per withdrawal. So I got to go down there. So I keep cash on hand at all times. I have cash in investments. So, like, I have investment accounts and I keep cash. Part of it is cash. Why? Because it's stability of the asset classes. So if you have different classes of assets, you have bonds, you have stocks, you have IRAs and ETFs, everything. You want a stable bottom. You want something that is foundational. And this foundational, you should contribute to it on a regular basis because you want that basis to never be compromised by the whims of the other investments. This is hard for people to grasp. Cryptocurrency, the stable coins are supposed to be that, but they have the risk of depegging. So in my mind, I would never throw all of the assets I have at cryptocurrency. That's why. Because you always want to have a foundational. If something happens to you, to your family, to your home, I don't care. Tornado fight, whatever. If something happens, you always need to be able to fall back to something that you can rely on, that you.
[00:21:12] Speaker C: Can bank on, no pun intended. And here's the thing. I know that some of the media.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: And some of the influencers will sell this narrative of transactions all happening in cryptocurrency. I'm telling you straight, and I'll keep.
[00:21:24] Speaker C: Saying it, the lifespan of everybody listening to the show. We're not going to get to that point.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: We're never going to be at a.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: Point where you don't need banks or that you don't have to have debit cards or cash in some form, be.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: It electronic or otherwise.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: It's not going to happen because there's.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Too much that depends on fiat and that's not going to change.
[00:21:48] Speaker C: I talked about on the last episode.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Mortgages and the fact they won't even accept it as a proof of value for proving that you can pay back the loan, or proving your assets, that you have liquid assets. They won't accept it because they know it's not real, the price isn't real. The IRS doesn't care, but the mortgage companies, they care. They will not take this. So for me, as a recommendation, and I'm not telling you what to do, I'm saying I would recommend having a foundation of some kind that is truly stable, that is fiat. Yes, the inflation bites into it, but you're not spending it. So when you're not spending it, the inflation doesn't affect it. Obviously, the value of it doesn't go as far because the price of things is going up, which is why you have to keep increasing it. The analogy I can give you when you were younger, hopefully this was the case. But when you were younger, your parents may have told you about the value.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Of a piggy bank. The whole point of the piggy bank.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Is not just to save for you to go and buy food or buy gum or buy something, although that might.
[00:22:51] Speaker C: Have been when you were really young. All you could do, right, I'm going to save up to buy that video game or something. Sure, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the real intent behind the piggy bank was to teach you the value of just putting money away. Putting a little bit away, a little bit away, a little bit away, a little bit away. And then the feeling of the growth of that piggy bank and it getting heavier and heavier and the feeling of wealth. This is intangible now.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: You can't feel the wealth of something sitting in your bank. You can go look at the numbers and that's assuming that you in. Did you know your bank can seize your assets anytime they feel like it? I'm not trying to freak you out. I'm saying that's a reality. That's why I keep cash on hand, because something could happen to the bank. The bank could go insolvent, the bank could get seized, the bank could get robbed, all sorts. So this is not paranoia, it's just the reality of what could happen am the mitigation in the event that something happens. I always keep cash on hand, period. Which is why it's frustrating seeing so.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: Many things like hotels refuse to take.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Cash these days because as they rush towards electronic. I just dealt with this in a hotel when I moved up here. The freaking card swipe machine went out. It died. So they couldn't take the payment.
And you're going to laugh. They had me fill out a paper form because they can't take cash. I got cash on hand. I can easily book the room. They can't take cash. But they do keep cash on hand for when you want to buy something, for the little machine with the food. They've got cash, so they have a cash register so they could take cash. They refused to take cash. So they're relying on that freaking card reader to always work. Then I got in an argument with a person online who said that some young person who swore that we're, quote, slowing up the line, paying cash. Let me tell you what happened the other day. I was in line. I can't recall if it was target or somewhere else. I was in line somewhere. And, okay, this guy wants to get fancy and use his fucking smartwatch. And I'm sorry, I'm pissed about this. Right? Use his smartwatch to pay for whatever it was. So he's holding his smartwatch to the little reader, oh, it's Chickfila. Hold his smartwatch up to the reader to take the payment. This guy, it took him like three minutes to get this darn thing to work. Three minutes. He just kept trying. It wouldn't work. That's the problem. Like you're relying on this iffy fucking technology. I'm sorry. That's what slows up the line. You're banking on Internet access. You're banking on iffy technologies. You're banking on no interference from whatever, electrical interference. Three freaking minutes. I get to the line. I get up to the lady and, okay, how are you paying? Cash? Go and pull forward. So I got to jump. So he slowed up the line, three.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: Minutes, I got to leapfrog the line.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Because I was paying cash.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: I get up there, pay the cash, I'm out, 12 seconds flat. So this narrative that cash is slow.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Cash, no, we've slowed everything down with.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: All this fancy touch technology and garbage.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: When cash actually was perfectly fine. And I am diverging on a rant.
[00:26:02] Speaker C: Because what I'm trying to emphasize to you is the reason why I keep.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Cash on hand, because you can't count on technology to serve you when you need it. And I work in technology. That's how I know these things. So technology is the technology is the fundamental reason that I keep cash on hand, because I can never bank on.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: It when I need it.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: I've seen time and again. So the foundation of my portfolio and my asset classes is fiat cash and all this beautiful, wonderful glory. And someday I'm going to get back to ironing and putting cologne on my money, too, by the way.
Next up is from cryptocurrency in places. I don't go all in. I just buy in places here and there, and I watch it and I take profits. It's not designed to make me a millionaire. It's designed as another asset class, amongst other asset classes. I have bonds in places. I actually have paper bonds. And then the government changed the way you get those. And I said, screw you. But at one point, I had those. I have some stocks. I have Etfs, of course, the bitq, which is amazing. I have all sorts of different asset classes spread out in multiple different banks and different facilities because I don't trust any one of them. The diversity diversification of the portfolio is key, especially now with the volatility that's going to be upon us here shortly. You want to make sure you have a diverse portfolio now that's harder to track if it's in multiple different places and different asset classes, and there's no single tool that solves that problem. So you may need to actually pull out the good old computer. And some of you young folks who are anti computer, you can try to find some app that will help you do it, or just ignore leister cryptotalkradio. Net. But if you're like me and you want to be smart with your money as we get into a very tumultuous time, I do recommend that you dust off your old computer. Embrace it again as the friend that it's going to be.
[00:27:50] Speaker C: Get some basic software, excel online is free, by the way, and figure out how to track all the different classes that you have.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Figure out what you may lack.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: What are the gaps in your assets? Are you missing stability in your portfolio? Figure out what you need to fill the gaps in with. And again, don't yolo into stuff.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Please make sure that money is always on hand, whether it's cash or not.
[00:28:12] Speaker C: Just make sure you're keeping money on hand for the incidentals things that come.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Up, because I'm guaranteeing you it's going.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: To be harder before it's easier for those people that are just yoloing into.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Some of these garbage projects out.
