How to Use Bitcoin to Supercharge Your Retirement! (Without Breaking IRS Rules)

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If you’ve ever wondered how to build wealth faster using crypto while keeping your retirement strategy fully IRS-compliant, this episode breaks it all down. Wealth Made Simple sits down with BitcoinIRA co-founder Chris Kline to uncover how everyday investors are using Bitcoin and other digital assets to protect, grow, and future-proof their retirement savings.

Chris shares the origin story of BitcoinIRA, how the platform grew to over $12 billion in assets, and why more Americans are choosing self-directed IRAs to hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and dozens of other tokens. You’ll learn the tax advantages, the transfer and rollover process, how lending and collateralization work, and why the volatility conversation changes completely when you zoom out to a 20–40 year retirement horizon. We also dive into institutional adoption, the evolving regulatory landscape, the impact of halving cycles, and what long-term Bitcoin accumulation can mean for generational wealth.

If you’re serious about building a stronger financial future, make sure you subscribe to Wealth Made Simple for more expert interviews and smart-money strategies. Drop your questions in the comments, let us know your thoughts on Bitcoin in a retirement account, and watch our other episodes to continue leveling up your wealth game!

#bitcoin #cryptoretirement #cryptoinvesting

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to Wealth Made Simple Podcast. I'm here with Chris Klein, one of the founders of Bitcoin IRA. Chris, how are you doing today? Wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. What a cool place. I'm ready to dig in on some crypto, some tax savings, and some retirement.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Yeah, man. Well, I'm glad to have you in the studio. We just started building this whole thing out, and you're one of our first guests, man. I'm excited to bring you on because there's been a lot of volatility in the Bitcoin space lately.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Indeed. And I think uh it's a it's a good time to be maximizing on the the wins that the market's giving you. Yeah. Uh you're supposed to buy low, sell high. And so this market's giving us a nice little blessing to get into this space, and we'll probably tap into a little bit of that today.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yes, we're gonna jump right into it. We want to learn how we can build our retirements, how we can build wealth faster. And we view you as one of the experts in the space. So if you don't mind, share with us a little bit about how you got into the Bitcoin space.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Yeah, so uh I'm originally from Colorado, born and raised. Uh, came out, I was telling you at dinner last night, I came out of a one-way ticket in a suitcase uh to Los Angeles and uh serendipitously met my business partners that were doing uh things in the retirement alternative space, real estate, LLCs, precious metals, uh, land. Uh, and it came across our desk in 2015. Could Bitcoin go inside of a retirement account? And we went to work and now what's that almost just over 10 years later, we're at over $12 billion of assets under custody and over 200,000 happy users uh using these tools.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Wow, that's absolutely incredible. And for many of your clients now, they're holding just Bitcoin or are they holding multiple assets inside of the IRA accounts that you guys set up for them?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

So we have up to 87 different cryptocurrencies and digital assets available, but they're holding it also alongside real estate, they're holding it alongside private notes, promissory notes. Um, uh some we even have a guy that does the John Deere tractors inside of it. So the sky's the limit in the functional tool that we've used. Uh, and but a lot of them are are are in lots of different asset classes inside the same platform.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

I think most of my listeners really want to figure out ways in which they can build wealth faster. Yeah. I constantly talk about how you can save money, but as a tax professional, I'm not talking about ways in which you can build wealth. Yeah. Talk to me about how you've been able to structure your company to support people.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Uh, you know, I at the end of uh at the end of the day, when we started this business over 13 years ago, we realized there was a retirement crisis and people just aren't participating. Right now, 50% of Americans actually don't participate in any type of retirement plan, which is crazy when it's one of the few tools that the government actually gives us to save on taxes and build long-term wealth at a arm's length distance. Yes. And so that built our mission of help more Americans retire and put those tools in place. It's also, you know, the traditional portfolio theory is you have stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and usually your primary residence. And that's kind of the circle that most people tried to fill for decades. Yeah. That game has changed. You can't rely on just those three things and your and your primary residence to build long-term wealth. You've got to get creative and you've got to get into what I call that alternative sector, whether it's precious metals, uh different types of real estate land. We have a guy that does farm tractors inside of his IRA. And and that led us to how creative could we get? And that's where we came across uh Bitcoin as an option about 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Wow. So you guys are focused, your company, on helping people build their retirement through Bitcoin. And Bitcoin's an alternative investment. So talk to us a little bit about what alternative investments are for the person who doesn't really understand alt investments.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Usually it's what you're not gonna find at a Fidelity, a TDM air trade, or an e-trade. So they'll have stocks, bonds, mutual funds, they'll have ETFs, so like emerging market ETFs. There's the Bitcoin ETF now. Um, you'll see uh sometimes there's currency ETFs where they're bundling these kind of new age products that don't exactly exist in the space as a direct investment. Yes. Uh but what we've tried to focus on is direct custody of those things. So instead of getting, I call it like a paper IO IOU, instead of buying a REIT, I want a real piece of real estate. Instead of getting Bitcoin in an IETF, I want a real Bitcoin in a wallet secured for my long-term savings. Yes. Because all of those other assets, and at the end of the day, they're dollar denominated. So someday when you have to liquidate them, you have to put them into, I call it dirty dollars and then take them out of your IRA. When you're holding the real thing, you can distribute in kind. So you can distribute your real estate holdings as your distribution requirements for the government. You can distribute a piece of your Bitcoin or your Ethereum or a tractor, whatever it might be that's holding there, you can do in-kind distribution, which allows you to continue to hold that asset that you love even past your retirement age.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah. So for somebody that's thinking about retirement right now and they feel like they are behind, right? They're looking at their 401k and they're like, how is this account ever going to get to a million dollars? What is something that they should be considering right now to accelerate their growth if they're in their mid-30s right now, trying to get their retirement dollars up?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Well, I think the first thing is you're not alone. And sometimes I find with Americans that when they feel like they're behind, they're kind of there's a shame uh and they're kind of embarrassed. And so they'll just brush it under the rug. Uh, and and so just acknowledge, you know, acceptance is the first step, right? Of okay, I've got to do something about this. The next is to maximize as much as you can. So every year you can put aside $7,500 to $8,000 as an individual for retirement. You can also, if your company's offering, take advantage of the corporate match. It's not as good as it used to be because corporations, as you know, as a business owner, we're getting squeezed on healthcare costs. I mean, I just got my bill for next year. It spiked another 13% year over year on premiums for healthcare. And that's a lot of so that where a business has to say, okay, maybe I have to lower the match or maybe have to do something a little differently. So take whatever match you can get and also empower yourself. Learn, get educated, listen to guys like you, guys like me, get started somewhere, get off zero. Um, and there are deadlines to it. You can't like all of a sudden you make $50,000 extra dollars. You're like, all right, I'm ready to catch up on retirement now. You actually have to do it every year because there's a deadline. By the tax day, you have to put that money aside. Otherwise, you can't go back and do catch up years or things like that. So it's really important to follow the timetable and start slow. You can start $1,000 a month if you can't do the whole $7,500, but get off zero somewhere. It's an overwhelming and daunting task. Northwest Mutual just came out with a study in right before COVID. They surveyed about 20,000 people and said, Well, how much do you think uh you can retire comfortably? And the average was $500,000. And that was 2018, 2019, pre-COVID. Wow. Since then, in five years, it has it's a staggering 1.8 million, is what those same people think they need now because of rising costs. They're worried about outliving their their retirement and and the cost of healthcare and all those other things. So you've got to get started early. Uh 30s is great, but 20s is even better. You know, I had I had a teacher in high school, uh, Miss Gunkle, it was a Spanish teacher. First day I walk in, uh, like I think it was like a it was around tax time, and we walk in, and normally it's Spanish stuff on the chalkboard or blackboard. This was all IRA stuff and how compounding interest works and these types of things. So I credit her all the time. Thank you, Miss Gunkle, for getting me into retirements young. Yeah, but when you start earning income, you can start right away and do these things as long as you're making money. So if it's a high school job, put aside then if you can. If you're in your 20s, put aside the most that you can. Earlier is better, as we know from the Warren Buffett's and beyond, yeah, because you can compound interest over time. Yeah, but you can't just rely on dropping money in and it's gonna get to a million dollars. You have to invest it wisely, and that means diversification. And that's where we come in of having things like Bitcoin and crypto and Ethereum and Solana and all these other things. Because what better place if you really believe in the future of currency to use a retirement setting where you get all that tax advantages, which I'm sure we'll talk about, like the Roth and the traditional and the SEP and the capital gains implications, all that goes away if you use the tool appropriately with these alternatives.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yeah. Chris, we have the traditional IRA, we have the Roth IRA, but I hear from clients all the time I don't I don't make the type of income anymore to even qualify to contribute to a Roth IRA. So, what solutions do they have to be able to still build money inside of a tax-advantaged account like a Roth?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Absolutely. So uh the MAGI score, right? Once you hit that magic number and it's you can't do this anymore. There's two tools. Um, one is if you have kids, set them up with Roth IRAs, do them a favor, especially if they have starting having uh Roth uh earned income. I was talking to you last night at dinner about Isabella. Yeah, she started young in some commercials in Los Angeles, so we were able to put funds aside then. Um and now she works. And if you own a small business, you should have your kids on the payroll and make them work. It's very healthy, it's a healthy thing for them, and it's a good uh, I think it's a just a jump start for for their life. But I like what I do is I pay, I think it's you'll know this number better than me, but it's about 15,000, 16,000 you can pay tax-free. So I pay her that, and then she puts $7,500 in her Roth, and the rest goes towards her private school education. So she's now vested in her education and she's paying for it. So when she says on a Tuesday, I don't want to go to school, it's like you're paying for it, girl. Wow, you should really go. But yeah, do that. And then if you aren't, so if you're making over, I think it's a single person's about 150, I think just roughly, and then uh married is like 225, I think. Right, they're not not qualified for a Roth. You can do what's called commonly known as the backdoor Roth or a Roth conversion. Correct. So, and this is like a great tool to use strategically. So make sure you're talking to Carlton and it's part of your tax strategy and planning, because if you have 200,000 in your IRA and you want to turn it into a Roth, you could that's a very big tax implication. You're in essence taking a distribution and the funds are going from a traditional sense, pre-tax to a post-tax sense. And there's a tax implication for that. But a lot of our clients will do is they'll at some point, like especially when crypto was in bear markets, so you know, when it was in six, seven thousand six or seven thousand, that was when they said, All right, I'm gonna do my conversion now, pay my tax bill, and then I'll have tax-free growth and distributions moving forward. Yes, that's a powerful tool to do, and then you can you do your natural traditional contribution every year, so you're 7,500 or 8,000 if you're over 50, and then you convert that later in the year. You do you basically go after you can we have clients that literally deposit in a traditional funds arrive, they open up a Roth, we do the conversion, the funds move over, and that's when they buy the Bitcoin. Yes, and you can also do it before or after you buy the assets too. You can convert an uh an IRA that already has assets inside of it.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Absolutely. What's some of the biggest Roth accounts that you've seen, like you know, over your time?

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Other than Peter Teals, what he's gonna do.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah, I mean Peter Teal's what five billion?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

I think it's five billion, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

What was his strategy on building his Roth?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

He put the shares, he put the shares of the early companies like Facebook and uh PayPal. And so he took in his agreement as an investor, he named his retirement account as the investor. Wow and the shares were issued to that, so he was able to tuck them in there. Um, and I think there's a way, and you'll probably know this better than me, but there's a strategy he used to be eligible for a Roth in doing so as well, because it wasn't US dollar income, it was shares, kind of like how Elon bought Twitter or X tax free and those the same strategy that they use because you don't really get taxed on shares, you get taxed on income. Correct. So use that strategy. You know what I've seen is um bold people. So I've seen I've seen people slowly build up over the years into Roths, you know, a thousand eight thousand dollars at a time, or when they take an old 401k and roll it over, they'll do a conversion there. They'll do a conversion with the world. 55. Started at five back in March of 2020. At five years old. No, five million. No, at five million dollars. That's what your children, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So your daughter has had a Roth IRA since held about five, five years old, yeah. Five years old. And instead of putting traditional dollars inside of her Roth, you have her Roth own Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, and Ethereum and Ethereum. What has that done for her investment account that may be different from someone who's holding U.S. stocks?

SPEAKER_00 11:29

It accelerated to the point where if she chooses to go to college, and I have a mentality, I've gone, you went, you were an athlete, I was an athlete. Um, we both went through college. If this generation is a little different, um, and honestly, having come out of it, I think education is important, but I also think that if you don't go in with a purpose, I think trades can be much stronger moving forward. Absolutely. So many kids are just popping out with a college degree. I don't know about you, I've got 160 employees. We don't often hire fresh college graduates, and it's nothing against them, but it's a huge learning curve. And I'd I'd prefer, I don't even look at the education on a resume. I look at what they've done and can they do the job I'm looking for them to do? Yes. Um, but for her, it's accelerated. So she's got um probably about 150, I think, a thousand. And that was off of annual contributions for she's 11 now, so seven years. So she's been you can think, you can do the math. She accelerated the the growth of it. And as you know, you can also use Roth distributions early for uh first-time home buying expenses and other things like that. So if she chooses not to do college, she's got a nice down payment for a house, which is not something I don't know about you, my parents left me with.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

That's increasing.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

That was my ultimate goal. I always joke with uh my CPA, and I'll probably joke with you as my new tax planning guy. Is like they ask me, what is it you want to achieve when you exit your business? And it's like, well, I just want my daughter to be good. Yeah, because that like that's I just want my kids to not have to worry about student loans, not have to worry about the first home. Like, give them give them that jump start that I didn't get. I not I don't want to spoil them. I don't want, you know, I want to control those things. And they always laugh, they're like, Well, you're gonna have to do a little bit more than that. Like there's there's more to do than just those two things. But to I don't know, maybe it's that middle class mind mindset we grew up with, yes, where it's just like if I can just do those two things. I mean, it was like, I bet when you were a kid like me, because you're about eight years younger than me, when we were kids, it was like, man, if I could just make a hundred thousand dollars, I'd be rich. Yep. Set, right? A hundred percent. And then you made your first hundred thousand, you're like, don't feel rich. And then it was like maybe two fifty, and then it's a half a million. Then you have your first million dollar year, and even and and yes, lifestyle creep happens too, but it's the larger tax bills, and just it's it's never, I mean, there's a point, everybody's got a number, yeah. But to feel wealthy in this country today and the cost of everything, I even think people that are making a million or or two million are still still stressed. I hear the magic number is five. If you can do five a year after and do really good tax strategy, then you can feel that's like a comfort level of that upper percentile.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

And even still, that that needle might continue to move with the way our government spends money. Talk to us a little bit about why someone would even choose Bitcoin inside of their retirement account. Bitcoin touched, I think, a all-time high of what, a about 126, 127,000, but today it's sitting around that just 96, 97. So when someone sees that when someone sees that type of volatility, they're like, why would I even consider owning Bitcoin when it's so volatile? You know, I rarely see Apple or Google or these blue chip stocks dropping so dramatically like this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Well, those days come too, right? Absolutely they do. March 2020 is a great example that nothing's safe and sacred. Absolutely nothing. I would say, to me, if I'm thinking I'm thinking long term, I'm 40 years old, I'm not gonna touch my retirement for probably another three or four decades, and hopefully it'll just become an inherited IRA for Isabella. Yeah. Um, and I won't need to touch it, and it's just passing that tax savings on. But my style is like we said with that modern portfolio theory, I want to put the riskiest assets inside my retirement because I have the most amount of time for them to do what they need to do, as opposed to a fixed income model. Now, obviously, well, I if I was on fixed income and I'm 70 or 80 years old and I'm and I need to take funds out, no, not a great idea to have it in Bitcoin and have to play that. Okay, where's it at today? And what's what am I cashing out for? This is a long-term when in doubt. I'm zooming out and saying, in 40 years, where do I really think the US dollar is going to be? And that's what really drives me and most of our early adopters and our new clients today is there's a big concern about fiat fiat currency. We haven't seen it in modern life, but if you ask anybody in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s, even more recently, uh Greece and Turkey, you can wake up one day and whatever was in your bank account is lost 20, 30, 40 percent of its value. And we think cash is safe, right? But if the government is making decisions like they are, this is where hyperinflation comes in. They go they're they turn they turn the they turned the printers on in 08, they kept them running and then cranked them up for COVID. Yeah, and they really have no choice. I know they just reopened and they and but and they kicked the can another 90 days. The the debt that's that are that the that we have and the interest payments on that debt, they're gonna just have to keep printing. There's really they've they've boxed themselves in. There's no way out of this. They're gonna print themselves to oblivion, which is what has happened time and time again. You know, I think they say the longest standing fiat currency is about 140 years or 150, and the US dollars like uh being fiat 1972 is when we went off the gold standard. Right. So we're getting we're getting closer and closer to that hundred, you know, that hundred-year cycle where it's going to it's gonna, and this is we're printing, we're making wealth out of thin air like that's never been done in the history of the world at this point.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Chris, if you could explain to us what modern portfolio theory means.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

So it's taking and adding that segment of an alternative base. So whether it's uh real you see now people using real estate, I know one of the things you do is you use real estate as significantly as building your portfolio. Yes. So instead of just doing stocks bonds, mutual funds, cash holdings, fixed income, treasuries maybe, you're adding in something that is to me, when it's modern, it's not dollar denominated. So you're not just buying an ETF of REITs or something like that. You're actually saying this is a property of real estate that I want in my portfolio as a rental property. I'm making passive income. I'm using it for tax depreciation. I'm also getting equity in the home, doing all the tools that you do. Yeah, you can do that with real estate. You can do it with land, is another great one out there. Acre trader is a it's not my company, but it's a great one. You can actually buy fractions of acres of farmland and you get your every harvest that comes out, or if the land gets sold or whatever, you get a nice dividend check every every harvest and those things, another passive play. Um, and then cryptocurrency or um anything else. We we actually had people buying uh barrels of oil at one point and storing them, or precious metals, gold and silver bars and coins. These are things that that no matter what happens to the dollar, they're your they're your hedge against all the craziness that happens in dollar-denominated assets.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Absolutely. Most people don't even consider having a hedge, right? They just hold money in in dollars or in a high yield savings account, or they'll have money just sitting in in stocks. Talk to us about how you've been able to hedge yourself over the years and how that's been able to help you, and how you're educating people who may have been stuck in one way their entire life, so how they invested and need to start adopting Bitcoin or even understanding more about these alternative investments.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

First thing I do is I don't trust cash. Uh because to me, even a high yield savings account for what's four to five percent, maybe you gotta lock it up to get any higher than that. Yes, you do. That we're at what? Uh, and I think this is the thing, especially as a fitness guy like yourself, people always forget that inflation is cumulative. It's not like we reset, so it's not like to January 31st and it's and it's a new year and all the inflation is gone. It's cumulative. So uh the greatest um metaphor I've had for it as I saw on Twitter X was um, okay, I I lost five pounds this year, but the last three years I gained 12, I gained six, and I gained seven. And it's like, why am I still fat? Well, it's because you did you you didn't offset. And the only way inflation goes down is deflation. And there is no political capital in this country or in this world really for us to have measures for for deflation. That is that is a very painful process for all Americans. And people, anybody that puts those in place is not getting re-elected, might get impeached, might, they might be storming the gates of the White House or Congress if it's something like that, because that's a painful thing. Most of what who's alive today doesn't remember scarcity, they remember abundance, abundance, abundance. And if you start taking away that abundance, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna be painful. So I think that that's what I don't I try to put personally, I try to leave less than three months of liquid supply needs for bills and those types of things in cash. And if I can do it for two months, okay. And then I layer in things that I'm that I'm willing, but I try to keep everything uh as far as an asset outside of just US dollars. Yeah, uh that's the easiest thing because nothing, even a high interest, is not making up for what I'm losing in dollar purchasing power. And and that's I think the thing the folks don't really get educated or don't get in financial literacy is okay, yeah, I have a hundred thousand dollars in my savings account. And yes, when inflation happens, you still have a hundred thousand dollars in your savings account, but that hundred thousand goes a lot less the distance than it ever has been before, and you feel that, and that's where you need to put your money to work and just putting in a savings account so fire or otherwise making a couple uh a couple of basis points here or a few percentage points there, you're never gonna keep up with rising costs, yes, uh, and and the valuation of the dollar. So that's one big thing I do. And then I I follow a lot of the strategies that you that you preach on a lot too is using retirement accounts, using uh um S-corps, um, try sometimes well some LLCs for limited liability, but using all the tools that are available, and you got to educate yourself on it too. That's the other thing is a lot of folks, you know, they just they they go with what they their grandfather or their mother or father taught them, and they never really take the time to say, No, I gotta think out the box here. I remember we were talking at dinner last night, that first year I made good money, and when that tax bill came out like this sucks, but now being having strategy in place that you get to keep a lot of your money. And I I think you have a great line out there that paying taxes is unpatriotic, and it truthfully is. I mean, if you think about it, it's like three pennies of a of a of a bale of tea is why we basically started the American Revolution and went out there and burned down ships and started war with with uh with great uh the United Kingdom. That's correct. And and you think about where we're at today. You know, you're we were driving home from dinner last night, and Carl and I were talking about taxes, uh, because it was just we she's she loves your education, my wife and I would just and the Uber driver started asking questions from Turkey, um, and he started asking questions uh about why we we live in Arizona and it's the difference, the math difference, and things like that. Oh, yeah. And then we I started breaking down and to Carl is like, babe, you gotta think about it. They pay you, they they tax you when you make it, they tax you when you spend it, they tax it when you die, they tax you when you hand it to anybody. And if you buy an asset, they tax that asset, especially if it's a real estate, it's got property taxes assessment and things like that. And she and she was like, Man, this isn't to feel like a very American way of thinking, but we've it's like a frog in boiling water. We've just slowly boiled ourselves to this point, and we become numb. Yeah, and and we're afraid. And accountants, we were talking about this last night. Your average accountant doesn't want to have to tell you you owe money, it's a terrifying thing for them. Yeah, so they constantly will be overly uh protective of paying more, you know. When you I think you told me about. The one person that paid like 1.2 million in excess, that's a huge accounting error. Yes, it is. But it was probably because that's you have to have some aggression to use the tools the right way. I'm not saying nobody's here saying do tax fraud, do tax strategy so that you can have more money to save at the end of the day and use whatever's left over for long-term wealth generation.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Absolutely. And when it comes to building wealth, I have seen the wealthiest of individuals choose not to earn ordinary income. They will loan against their stock portfolio, take out loans against really anything. Have you seen that in the Bitcoin space as well, where people are leveraging their Bitcoin in the exact same sense? And is that something that you're even doing?

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Yes. So we the we already we offer it as well. We have a partner. I've used LEDN in the past, but we have a we have a lending partner kind of part of our portfolio that's been working diligently on this. So we have folks that uh they'll have their IRA with us, but then they'll call us and say, one of the things they love is our security. We have what I call the Pentagon of Custody, where we're working with the elite premier providers like Bitco um and Coinbase Prime and extra security, we get $250 million of insurance coverage. It makes it so that you can have your assets safe in retirement and not have to worry about security risks. So you have this amazing security thing. And then if you have crypto outside of that, uh sometimes it's like a ledger device or it's on a hot exchange and you're just one sim swap or email hack away from risk of your non-retirement crypto. Yeah. So once they get comfortable, they're like, hey, I've got another like hundred thousand in Bitcoin over here. Can I open up a non-IRA account? Absolutely. And so we've been opening those up for years for folks. Yeah. Uh and then now they called over the last because Lending had some rough years. This whole concept of lending, I think version one was we all saw what happened with FTX and the staking and Alameda. This version two that's come out, you can keep the asset in portfolio so it stays in wallet. It's collateral, it's not being re-hypothecated or leveraged. But you're able to take and say, have a million dollars worth of Bitcoin and you're able to put that up and get cash as loans and use it in the same way that people put their shares up for their company so that they can avoid taking ordinary income. But yes, that's very popular. I'm working on, I don't know if I'll pull it off. I told you last night I'm trying to make it so that you can use your IRA money and do that. But there's a big rule with the IRS about not leveraging retirement accounts. Yeah. Uh and so, but you know, they also didn't think it was, they thought it was pretty crazy when I said let's put Bitcoin inside these things 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

So and were you the first to come up with this with this idea? That's absolutely 2015.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

The challenge came across my desk from my partner Camillo, and I had to, I honestly was like, What's Bitcoin? I I had not explored it.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

And so 2015 was when you first found out about Bitcoin. Yep. And went down the rabbit hole, read that. And one of your partners just came and put a white paper on your desk and said, Read this.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

See if there's something we can do with this. Because he's a YPO member and he was and people were coming to him. And he he's got a you know, good entrepreneurs, especially serial entrepreneurs, they have a good ear to the street. Yeah, and they're always smelling, and he's always you're you're paranoid, but you're also very curious. Yes, of course. Curiosity, yes. And so he hears something, and as I'm I've always been his operator, and he's like and he likes the way my mind works. He's like, see if this is possible. So I broke it into pieces. That's how my brain works, is like a mechanic. Okay, here's the car that I want it to look like. Let's break it out apart. And what do I need? I need a transmission, I need this, I need these. Okay, let's see if we can put these together. And I remember having to fly to Kentucky, the banking people that we were working with, the regulars in South Dakota, and and I mean, sometimes they couldn't even pronounce Ethereum. You know, it was it was it was a struggle to get to cover removal. And eventually I went with, okay, it's been six months of me knocking on the door, knocking on the door. I'm going for forgiveness now. You know, I tried permission and we just went with it. And actually, our first client was Edmund C. Moy, the former director of the United States Mint. Um, he was uh he was appointed by George W, so Bush 2. Okay. Uh, and he was arguably then was when we printed the most amount of money uh for to get through the 2008 crisis. So the guy at the time that printed the most amount of fiat money was the first to put Bitcoin in his long-term retirement holdings. Wow. Which spoke.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

So the guy the guy who put us into an inflationary environment.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

He wasn't the only guy. I love Ed. He's awesome. Okay. I mean, it was he he did he did it, he followed orders. He's the mid director, so he's got to print somebody's gotta tell him to print, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Fed's gotta get it. But he essentially said, okay, I need to go put my money into something that's gonna be a hedge against what we just what we just did. Exactly. And instead of going and putting his money in gold, he wouldn't put his money in a digital asset. So talk to us, talk to us about why, why digital assets over physical assets like gold and silver.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

There's that great debate, right? You know, if if you look, I think uh my friend Anthony Pompliano uh and Peter Schiff just did a debate um uh in New York. And I think they're harmonious. I don't think there's like you don't have to be, I'm on team gold or team orange, right? You can be on both teams, and I've been on both. There, and we actually have uh what's called digital gold in our platform where you the gold is held in those big billy bars, I think is what they're called, and it's held at a depository at Salt Lake City Brinks. Oh, okay. And over the top of it is a as a blockchain, so that you can it issue tokens, and then you you have one-to-one uh representation, one ounce, one what uh one token of this is one ounce of gold. You can distribute and take the gold out, and it and it behaves in the same fashion of gold spot, which is nice because then you can we all have people that'll take their profits from Bitcoin and tuck it into gold. So they're very complimentary in that sense. Yes. Um, but you know, for me, I have held physical gold myself, it's cumbersome, man. Yeah, it's you gotta store it, you gotta secure it, you gotta ensure it. And I just recently, last year, I sold off. I had some long-term gold and silver and silver, don't man, one shoebox, it's like a monster box of silver American Eagles. It'll, I mean, you're top heavy. I'm not that strong. It was like it was like back breaking, and it was like it was a process. And then when I and I'm in I know the industry, so I know the wholesalers, I was able to set my price, should bring my product, ship my product. It was still almost almost a month from when I executed the liquidation to when the cash was in my hands, and I was I was wanting to put it into Bitcoin and Ethereum, is what I did once I got it at the end of the year. But that's 30 days, and time is money. Oh, 100%, just opportunity costs. Exactly. Now, there's I mean, my grandfather had gold in his safe. My dad's a big guy that has gold in the safe. I don't know, he might have it buried in the backyard too. I have an asset, but there's probably a treasure map somewhere. And there's use for that. Um, but digital assets give you better scarcity, Bitcoin in particular. I'm sorry, talking Bitcoin. Yes, better scarcity. There's only 21 million that'll ever exist. 19 and a half are accounted for. You and I both won't live to see the last Bitcoin mined. Maybe our kids will. Maybe. I think it's 2140, is when the last one they're estimating will happen. And it's and and it's also why it's so scarce is it punishes, and I hate to use the word punishes, but we punish the producers. So in the US, we reward producers of currency with what things call re-elections. If they put STIMI checks in our hands, they're gonna get re-elected. And that's what Trump's doing right now with the tariff checks and all these types of things, because he knows that's gonna help with the midterms. That actually just makes us print more money. That's how that none, there's nothing free here, it doesn't come out of thin air. They will print and create more monetary supply. With Bitcoin, the producers actually get punished as we get closer and closer to the finish line. And I love that was like if there was one characteristic of Bitcoin that that was like, I love this, because I I saw early on in economics, it was like we this can't last forever. And that and it puts more value to it, you know. And now miners on the next halving cycle, which will be 2035 or 2028 and 2030, by I think right around 2030, they will be competing for less than one Bitcoin reward because the reward's gone from 50 to 25, and yes, keeps cutting. And the cost of creating that Bitcoin has not gone down at all. The cost of production, these miners, it's just electricity costs keeps going up. Heat controlling heat. I mean, they're now putting these miners in like a liquid gel to get the heat down. One of the coolest submersion, right? They're submerging cooling. One of the coolest ones I saw, there's two. Um, there's a really uh cool one in Iceland. They use the geothermal um from the hot spots in Iceland, and that's their energy that they use for a mining operation there. Wow. That's a really cool group. Uh, I got to meet them early on. And then with El Salvador, as you know, they changed to a Bitcoin reserve current as a reserve currency, as their currency in 2021, I think it was officially. How's that working out for them? Crimes down, direct investments up. Google just built a skyscraper there. I think Yahoo's doing it next. And let's think about what El Salvador was. It was a banana republic that was that suffered from natural disasters, uh uh, explosions of um hurricanes, or not hurricanes, uh volcanoes, yeah, and coups after military coups after intervention from foreign parties. It's a colonial disaster. And we look and and I don't know if it was us, the Spanish, the French, somebody just left it in a bad spot. And you would have never thought that now it's this it's a safe place to be. I see I have friends that are out there that live there, there's Americans that have moved there to be a part of it. Um, and then I mean I think the health of a country is will foreigners come and invest money into the country? Do they feel confident with that? Just like a health of a of us as individuals, will a bank give me money, or will it can I can I get investment into what I as an entrepreneur? Will somebody invest in my business idea? Yeah, it's working for them. President's been re-elected a few times. Funny, Argentina was gonna do it at the same time. And the Argentinian president, well, they got cold feet? No, the World Bank and the IMF had him by the balls, is really what happened. And said, if you do this, we're cutting off all aid. And he was like, Why there's nothing I could do, and then you fast forward a few years, El Salvador's thriving. Argentina is literally they went through, I would call it hyperinflation, like 12, uh like 12, 2500 to like 2,500% inflation year over year. So their currency is falling apart. The US has had to come in and bail them out with buying bonds, and now they're considering Bitcoin again. Of course. And so that's a tale of two cities, in essence, that you see it happen. What I really thought was cool, and I wrote a piece for NASDAQ about this, was um El Salvador used so these volcanoes constantly blowing up, right? And and just wiping them out. You look at their history, it's like 10 different major eruptions that have done something. They're using the the geothermal power from the magma underneath these active volcanoes in order to mine Bitcoin in uh El Salvador? In El Salvador, and they're giving a birthright of the Bitcoin they're mining, they're giving a birthright to uh new El Salvador kids to have a a piece of Bitcoin as part of their so they're setting kids up for success. What fast forward? I mean, we may not live to see this, but that's gonna be, I think, think of like Dubai 10, 15 years ago. It's a desert, right? Yeah, oil was what drove that wealth. I think Bitcoin's gonna turn central Central America. There's gonna be this beacon shining light on the hill, which is gonna be El Salvador.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

That is incredible. Absolutely incredible. So your price prediction by the end of this year, from what I saw in another interview, was having Bitcoin at 180. Yeah. Bitcoin is sitting at $96,000 right now, and we have less than six weeks until the end of the year. Do you still stand firm in that prediction and what? Or not?

SPEAKER_00 32:41

I'll put a asterisk. I made the prediction in April uh on national television on Bloomberg, and Bitcoin was at 68 at the time. Wow. So directionally, I knew where we were headed. Do I think 180 by New Year's Eve? It could, you know, have you ever seen Angels in the Outfield? The little kid is like, it could happen. Yeah. Still, because I remember 2017, uh, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, it went from 4,000 to 22,000.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

So it can make those moves. There were this doesn't operate in a vacuum. Um, so the having, I think the impact of having is delayed. The traditional cycle is becoming a different type of cycle because we're not just a Bitcoin industry anymore. We're a Bitcoin industry that big banks are buying us up. Entire business treasuries are dedicated to it, like microsailer and strategy. Yeah. Governments are racing to reserve this as a piece of their current their their reserve balance sheet. Right. These are all things, plus you toss in this nice little government shutdown here and a few things here. And it's it's kind of had a little bit of a suppression to it. Yes. But I I'm kind of cheerful. I know that you were saying I dollar cost average every time I can under 100,000 because when that rubber band gets pulled back and keeps going back, well eventually it snaps, and that's when you spring forward. So it will we see 180 next year? Hands down. Will we see it by New Year's Day? Uh I'm if I was a betting man, I'd say I might need to buy the insurance. Yeah, I totally get you there. And that happens. The year before in 2024, I was in Nashville for the Bitcoin conference, and it was around 62,000 or 58,000. And I again on television, I said we'll be at 100K by Christmas Day. And I was actually a week early. It was the week before Christmas, it had hit 100 grand. Uh and that really, I mean, I also got lucky there because Trump's re-election just everything took off. It was, I mean, the world is skyrocketing. And I think that's part of the anticipation and excitement of the re-election and the reality. There's a little bit of an imbalance, but that's true for every politician, right? What they say on the campaign trail to what they do once they get in the Oval Office, there's always a difference. Of course. And I think some of that's starting to settle in for the crypto folk. And I think you're also fleeing it with real estate folks as well. We were talking last night about the 50-year mortgage concept. Great for the, I call them the the real estate cartels or syndicates out there, like Grant Cardones and the major players, because they're going to use that to their advantage. But for the average American, that if they're going to buy one primary residence their whole life, and that's like, because we're all built on the American dream, two kids married by this year, white picket fence. It's it's it's ingrained in in the in middle America. And they're gonna they're gonna suffer from that because that that's you're literally turning, I think, generational wealth into generational debt. Yeah. You're gonna owe on that house your whole life.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Absolutely. I hate that idea of the 50-year mortgage. I do like the idea of the portable mortgage. Do you think that's cool? What did you think of that?

SPEAKER_00 35:22

I just wonder, you know, the idea is awesome. In theory, it's like great. I have I'm a guy sitting on 26 years left on a 30-year note that I got it in when rates were at near zero, right? Two, two or three percent. Awesome. And that's and that might would that get them if they could port make that portable to another real estate? Yes, will it help more houses get sold? Will it help build out uh and and boost the real estate market? Absolutely. Absolutely. What bank's gonna underwrite it though? That's the part I was so confused on. It's like, why would I want to take that paper when I can get better paper here? Yeah, you know, SVB and signature bank both went down because they managed their treasury on their paper inappropriately. They were paying, they were, they got into these long 10-year notes of 1% or 2% at near zero interest rates. Yeah, and then they couldn't compete when they were taking out debt on the other side at four or five percent. And that's what made them insolvent banks. Banks are very, very particular about risk and reward ratios to take in paper from somebody else or port it into a new real estate asset and and not get the benefit of new rates, like that breaks their business model at the end of the day. I mean, we've all seen the big short. That's it, it started banking was boring, and then banking wasn't so boring anymore once the the the CDO came out and the concept of a mortgage-backed security came out. Yeah. So that that to me, I think that's it's great for the uh average American to do, but I don't know if I don't know a bank that's gonna underwrite it at the end of the day, like really take that paper on. Um, obviously great. I think if and you're more of a real estate guy than I am, but I think if you really want to fix real estate, and I heard Grant Cardone say this on a space that I was on with him the other day, is you got to get the regulars out of the way and just let people build. I grew up in a construction family. I live in Scottsdale. I watch houses go up and then they stall for six months waiting for permits for electrical or this. Yep. Um, we were not far now from Palisades where the fire with the tragic fire was at earlier this year, and people still can't rebuild. They're having arguments in City Hall about getting uh abatement of the toxics, toxins and they it's you gotta somewhat sometimes, and this isn't just a left thing or a right thing, a green or a red or a blue thing, this is a universal thing. Got to get out of the way and just build more homes. There's land to build them on, there's people that need them. Um, and if we can build more homes, that's gonna that's a better tool to get to really boost up this economy these days, I think, rather than try these little tricks and gimmicks, you know, and also the tariff checks or tax credits. I it midterms are coming up, and we just and if you're on the if you're if you're a Republican, you're looking at what just happened in Virginia and New York and going, these are gonna be tough midterms. So we've got to start putting money. And Americans vote with their pocketbook. If they they'll tell you anything else, but when they get into that voting booth, am I better than I was four years ago? Is my bank account better than it was four years ago? Is my portfolio better? And they're making that decision at that at that basis. They'll tell you anything else you want, they'll go out there. I mean, I the funniest thing I saw when I was in New York was, and by the way, I'm an independent guy, I'm a libertarian. I don't take I'm I don't think this is a red versus blue game anymore. I think it's an orange versus green game. And I like to be on the orange side of things. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

So describe to me the orange, the orange.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

Orange is Bitcoin and and green is is US dollar. It's orange versus green. And orange versus green. I like that I look at the world. Okay. Because the difference between the average Republican and Democrat in this country today is about this small. Yeah. But the media and everybody in the world wants me to tell you that they're this far apart. But you see, but what you're what you're focused on is where is the asset? Where's the money? Where's the money? Show me the money, yeah. And and follow the money, and I think that's a better way to make make my decisions as far as and so I'm thrilled to see the Republican side encouraging crypto versus what we saw for four years. We suffered a lot under the Biden administration as crypto guys. It was tough. I there was a there was a Jamie Diamond came out and told us we were fraudsters. Yeah, we had a congressman in where I was up in Sherman Oaks that told us we were all uh kids in our mom's basements in our pajamas. And I was running a business in his district with 60 employees at the time, and we weren't in nobody's basement, we weren't in our pajamas, and we were taking we we were we were building wealth for Americans, but there was that MO that would and it's also because big bank is a big lobby, yeah, just like big auto is a big lobby, big farm is a big lobby. So again, follow the money. This is where these where it was very easy for Elizabeth Warren and others to push back on Bitcoin because they were in their pockets were dollars coming from Jamie Jamie Diamond and all the big banks. And and that's that's true a tale as old as time. And it's and it's true for both sides of it. And so for me, it's like, and I worked in politics, I actually worked on the McCann campaign right out of college, and I was just disgusted. My Twitter handle is at Senator Klein because I wanted to be a senator someday. Wow. And I got it in college, and I don't want to do that anymore. I told you I want to be a teacher after I retire. Yeah, uh, but that but it's a it's just a it's a cesspool and it's and a lot of backstabbing, things like that. And it doesn't, honestly, not a lot of it helps the average American at the end of the day. It's it's placating. We're now in a 24-hour news cycle, so it's like people's Americans' attention is is changing so quickly, and you can watch it. It's very divisive. That's the part that scares me the most. I think Bitcoin should be something of universal acceptance. We should all get behind it as opposed to fighting over the other differences that we have.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

Well, Chris, what's happening behind the scenes right now? Like, you know, we're seeing Bitcoin crashing, but on crash on TV, and all cryptos are crashing, but on TV, and at least where the news I'm seeing, things are being accepted at the government level. Yeah. Explain to us what's happening behind what's happening behind the scenes that nobody is really seeing right now that's moving forward with crypto and Bitcoin to make it more acceptable. Acceptable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Well, the institutions are here and they're staying and they're building out solutions. What type of big institutions are involved? Big, big and regional banks, uh hedge funds, registered investment advisors, big conglomerates. These are the guys that kind of strayed away from crypto for the last eight years, and then they kind of dabbled in it when the ETFs came out last January. Yeah. Um, but now they're going all in and they're looking at how can I acquire a crypto business or how do I build one? So if I just came out this week, the CEO, and they're putting crypto trading inside their their system, which is something they've been they've been trying to do, and everybody was waiting for clarity. So we needed, and I love how they called it the Clarity Act, and then they it like it's all worked out, and that was really given a lot of momentum. And then when the government shut down, all these there was all these groups, banks, institutions trying to create new ETFs or create new um lending tools or staking tools. And like you let the nerds loose and they were like, All right, I'm ready. I want to do now you gave me a path to turn in an application, get approved, and and build something great. And there was just this halt because the government shut down. Yes. So all the three letter agencies are closed, it's not just TSA, right? Where everybody's talking about the problems at the airport, IRS, the IRS is closed, the uh SEC is closed, the CFTC is closed, all the three letters and the uh the the the alphabet soup, as I call it, is all closed was all closed for 45 days. So you could turn in your application, but nothing was changing, right? It was just and that slowed down innovation. And I I'm hoping now that we're reopened again, we open those doors and we get back to because truthfully, if you look at the history of this world, put in the minds of of guys that have moxie, guys that have brains, guys that have balls, and gals too. Sorry, I don't mean to say it's just guys do those things, and that's what's great for America at the end of the day. Put empower them to change the world. The Steve Jobs is the world, the Carlton Dennis is the world. Yes, heck, even me. I mean, we we built something great for to help America. We're up to $12 billion in assets, and we've changed people's lives that we've changed their entire retirement strategy because they used this asset that wasn't available before.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

I love that. Now, let's just say someone wants an alternative crypto inside of their IRA. Maybe they're a big Solana holder. Okay, and they're like, okay, well, I want to have Solana inside of my Roth. How do I figure this out? What would be my steps to do this? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Well, we have 87 tokens, which is really awesome. So we're not, I know our name's Bitcoin IRA, but that's only because Bitcoin was only one around when we launched. Yeah. So Ethereum came out a year later, we launched, but we added Ethereum, we added Bitcoin Cash, uh, Litecoin, XRP, and now we're up to 87. I think we'll be up to 100 by end of first quarter next year. Wow. And we listen to our clients. They come to us and they're like, hey, I really want FET, which is an AI intelligence, uh, I uh artificial intelligence token. Or sometimes they want the memes. So we have Shiba, we have Trump Coin, we have Pep. Uh no, we don't have that one. Okay. We have some rules.

SPEAKER_01 43:14

Does anyone ask for that one?

SPEAKER_00 43:15

Yeah, they do. Oh, yeah, they do because everybody's looking for if I'm gonna get that thousand X coin, why not have it in a Roth IRA? That's true. So so they're always like, we try to protect as best we can for liquidity, security, and custody. So if we can keep it in our secure wallets behind our insurance and behind those things, checkbox one. Is there liquidity? You know, you see all these rug polls, and then Kanye did one, or I mean sometimes these celebrities get involved, and like they they pump and then they dump these things. I don't want those things running into retirement accounts. Something with longevity is good. Absolutely. But the question you asked is what's the steps you take? Well, first is determine what funds how you want to fund it. So if you if you're just gonna do your contribution, you can go to our app or online and you can open up your account in a matter of minutes. It's very quick. It goes through the security, KYC, all that, and then you can actually. Do via uh Plat or whatever the integration is, and to pull straight from your bank account and drop your max contribution for the year today. And the funds will clear and you'll be able to, you're off to 24-7 trading in the palm of your hands uh within a couple of days, max. Um, if or if that's you should all do that, by the way. We started the conversation with don't not do that, even if that's but do that part. That's that's step one. That's step one. But also, there are $2.3 trillion of old 401k money left behind. And I always call this like leaving your favorite hoodie at your ex-girlfriend's house. You just don't do it, right? So your old employer, a lot of people don't know, once you turn 59 and a half or you leave service of your employment, your 401k is now eligible for rollover. Yes, and people forget they have them. Uh and they sometimes forget where they are because they get sold between these groups. There's a really cool tool called Beagle, like the dog. Yes, and you can put in your basic information, SSN, and they'll go hunt down like a dog, like a bloodhound, hunt down any 401k funds that might be in your name that you forgot about. $1,000 here, $500 here. You know, people change jobs, right? Of course, absolutely six or seven jobs. And they forget where their rollovers are, how to log back. Not even know that they put it in there. Some people don't even realize that there's actually money coming out. They just uh they because a lot of these HR groups, uh, it's all opt-in right now. So you know, it's like you just check the boxes and they don't even know what they're checking the boxes for. It's just I they want to get through the age so they can get to work, right? That's that's they want to get through the lesson and get and get it done. So that's that's another option everybody should explore, see what they have there. And then if you have an existing IRA, like a traditional Roth, a SEP, um, or if you have like if you're more sophisticated, like a solo K or an Indy K, which is larger for smaller business, you probably have clients that have those things. Yes, you can take transfer portions of that into a IRA in our in our world, in our fiduciary. Um, and then now you're you can use the new funds, the rollover funds, or transfer funds, get them into the system, and now you're off trading. Now, here's the cool thing we've done, Carlton, is most if you go to Coinbase, crack in any of these places, you're gonna go on and ask for help and then you're gonna get like a robot, right? Or a chat bot. You're not gonna and there's no phone number to call. We stuck to our guns from the very beginning to stick stick with the analog because this is people's retirements. There's no, it's not a one size fits all. So you can call the actual number and talk to an actual human being that's helped the hundreds of thousands of users fund their accounts either. If you need how do I do it, am I Roth? How do I do a traditional or how does my rollover work or what's this paperwork I need? All these things. Uh, and and they answer the phone during business hours within about 90 to 120 seconds. And that's one of our biggest standards. I call real crypto, real people, so that you have those those people to help you and get that retirement done.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

Nice. So if somebody wants to roll their traditional 401k into a Roth 401k, is that something that you guys help with as well? And they can have Bitcoin crypto inside of a Roth 401k or is that only inside of IRAs?

SPEAKER_00 46:50

So the 401k will actually roll over into an IRA. So when you when you take a 401k, it's an employee sponsor plan. This is also true for 457s, 403Bs, thrift savings plans, which are government uh offerings for like if you're a soldier or if you work for the for the government, right? All those are eligible for rollover, and depending upon their tax setting, whether it's pre or post-tax, they'll roll into either a traditional or Roth IRA. If they roll over to a traditional, so it's a 401k, goes into the traditional, but you want that Roth, we'll move the funds over, open the traditional, we'll open up a Roth and we'll do a conversion for you. Got it. And that way you can you can achieve that Roth conversion right there on the spot early on. Just know that that's a 1099 into like R. I think it's R or S. I can't remember the letter after, but that that will be issued and that will be income that you've made on the year. You're not gonna, if you don't do the conversion, you're just moving money from your left hand pocket to your right hand pocket without a tax implication.

SPEAKER_01 47:39

Yeah. Now, if someone wants to really go all in on trying to contribute to a Roth and they're self-employed, would you recommend a SEP since they can max out um, I think it's close to about 69,000, almost 70,000 through a I do a SEP personally because it's a it's an awesome extra contribution of value every year.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

And you get to lower your tax bill. It's important to remember with a Roth, you're not lowering your tax burden for the year, your tax to taxable income. Correct. With a if you make $100,000, you put your $8,000 in in a trad sense, you're gonna lower your taxable income from $100 to $92,000. And and with a SEP, you can now drop it to $60,000. And that's really helpful with the tax braxit, correct? Maximization. With a Roth, you're not, you don't get that advantage on the front side, but you get that glorious advantage on the back side when you go to sell or you go to distribute, and it's a tax-free, entirely tax-free distributions. Yeah. Both have the benefit. And this is one of the things I like. I was telling you, we do oh we've done over five billion dollars, six billion dollars in transactions. People trade. Sometimes they want to move from a Solana or over into an Ethereum or they want to test a little bit here, roll it into gold. People transact regularly inside their retirements with cryptocurrency. You can do all those trades without ever having a capital gains implication. And a lot of guys, especially early on, didn't realize that they owe about 25% less Bitcoin than they think they do, because someday you're gonna have to sell it and you're gonna have to Annie up to Uncle Sam for that capital gains implication. That's right. There was also a big misnomer of oh, if I just swap from Ethereum to Solana, that's not it.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

No, that's that's that's a taxable event. When you go to trade Ethereum to Solana, Solana to Bitcoin, those are all taxable events.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

And we have staking now in our platform too. So you can stake Solana, Polka Dot, um Ethereum, Cardano, and Sui. I call it Sue. Sue. This is a funny name. Those are the five that are live. We'll have more coming. But then that's also nice because you're getting you're staking to build a better blockchain. Assets are staying in wallet, you're getting rewards in the coin you love. So you're getting up, I think one of them is up to like seven percent that you get a year in in staking rewards. Wow. Coming back, and it's in an IRA, so no tax implication for making interest because it's inside that that beautiful umbrella.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

So talk to us about how someone can trade crypto inside of a Roth IRA. How is it done?

SPEAKER_00 49:49

Once you're in there, then you log in. I was showing you last night. You will go into the it's on your mobile app, it's in the palm of your hands. Actually, Camillo, my partner, had a rule with trading. If he couldn't drive down the 405 and execute a trade, then it was too hard. And so that was what our our too dangerous. Yeah, yeah, he drives. He has the same car as you, and I can't I can't drive with him. I just can't do it. Like he drives like a maniac. Uh, but that's that was our pre pretense was like you have to be able to do that easily. So you just log in at 247, 365, holidays, Christmas, your birthday, Jesus' birthday, whenever uh you have access, and you can pick a coin, buy what you want, sell what you want, or do conversion swaps right there. So you can move funds from from Ethereum over to Salon or whatever it might be. And it's all self-directed, it's all within your control.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

What if someone has their Roth account currently sitting somewhere else with a money manager and they want to get it into a platform like this where they can start trading actively? How would they move it?

SPEAKER_00 50:44

Open up a like kind account. So if it's a Roth or a traditional or SEP or whatever it is, we'll open up an account for you on our side, and then you will dictate how much you want to come over in a transfer request. It goes custodian to custodian. So we would give you the form. So let's say it's at JP Morgan, and you it's a form, it goes to the JP Morgan transfer department. They would then move those funds at your direction. Um, you usually it's best to liquidate, get into cash for the amount you want to move over as you start the process, it speeds it up. I one thing I've learned about crypto investors, they're insatiable. They wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, and then they won it yesterday. Yeah. And and because crypto's moving now, it's like, okay, I want to get into Bitcoin. Today would be a great day to buy it 96, right? Right. Well, banks love to take your money, but they don't necessarily always like to give it to you. And so some of them move pretty quick. Fidelities, a couple days. Uh, 401k checks usually take a little longer because they issue them and then they send them to you, and then you have to send them to us, but we get you a FedEx mailer to speed those things up. But there are some groups like pensions. I the longest one I ever saw was Louisiana State pension. 90 days it took for this person to get their funds out and move it them over. Uh, but fortunately, even in those 90 days, they were getting into Bitcoin at like two or three thousand dollars. So they're thrilled. Oh wow, that's amazing. Pensions are a tough one. TSP is also the thrift savings plans, they have this old school paperwork. It's like they never evolved. It's you know, the papers when we were kids had like the little box for every character. That's what the paperwork looks like. It's called a T70 form. We can help you fill it out. It's really annoying, and actually, it processes in a manual processing. There's like this old nuclear fallout shelter in Pennsylvania somewhere, and I I've never been there, but I could just envision like final cabinets and like scanners and things of how this is getting pumped through the process. And actually, um, during COVID, when people were needing to take emergency distributions because they were furloughed or vets needed the money because COVID was rough on a lot of different groups of society. There was a huge thing where it was taking like 30 days for people to get their funds in emergency settings. Like that, that's just you can't do that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 52:38

What happened to alt season? You know, we got the president into the office, everyone's saying alt season's coming, and then it seems like it just came and never or it a little bit, but never came.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

ETH for in particular had a great like revenge run in August, July. Like there was a nice revenge run there. It's then come back on those. I think this is a different kind of cycle than what we've seen before. So the traditional four-year soup cycle is we get having 400 to 500 days post-halving, you get the peak, and then what happens is Bitcoin peaks, and then people start taking their profits from Bitcoin and they start putting it into alt because now that's like, well, I'm on house money, right? Yeah, so I'm gonna go and play with all these coins and they're chasing down those. But this is there's more coins than ever before. It's not a traditional cycle, which means that's I think I hate to use the word super cycle, but I think we're gonna look at everybody thinks the site, like if you're on like Bitcoin Twitter, it is there's half the world thinks the sky is falling, the other half is is as as vindicated as before. I'm more on the more vindicated side, but there's that fear greed index is very interesting, right? I think it's like an H7. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird one. Uh, but I don't I don't think we will I think we'll have will look like alt season from 21. No, because there I mean almost you could just it was like you could just pick you close your eyes and pick any other coin. It's gonna be there the projects that will succeed are the projects that show true utility. Uh one of them I'm a big fan of is Chainlink. Yeah, because now you have all these different chains, right? You have Ethereum chain, blockchain, Litecoin chain. At some point, you have to have a universal language where they connect. They can't. And that's what chain link's designed for, is to be that kind of that intermediary, that clearinghouse between chains. Uh, and if we if chains keep growing, especially with instant the government is real big governments are like the US government and others are really interested in chain link technology. I'm also I've been a fan of XRP for a long time. I think it's a I think it's got it's a really great product. I taught my daughter when she was four.

SPEAKER_01 54:31

Why are you a fan of XRP? What's the utility with it?

SPEAKER_00 54:33

I see it as uh not a replacement of the Swift banking, but I see it as a complimentary tool. There's a day when you think about it, and I'm not a W and two employee, neither of you, but like imagine why do we wait? Why was why do people get paid every two weeks or every month? Because banks are slow. And and like we put our payroll in as a bank as a company, and then and this because that there's a lack of a technology to really you should be able to get paid every day. And XRP can make that possible. That's a great use case of its utility where you're getting paid every single day. You could even get paid every hour. Like you put in an hour, you look at your bank account, my hours there. Because that chain, that technology can be used as a clearinghouse that has speeds that is hypersonic compared to the current uh settlement system. Where we're running into problems is I think banks think they they looked at the technology and they're like, Oh, I think we could build that ourselves, just like with stable coins, the USDC and those things. You hear JP Morgan's gonna come out with a coin. I've been in a lot of banking rooms where they're like, Well, if if JP's gonna have a coin, then I have to have a coin and now I have to compete. And that's the mentality that's happening. I think go fast forward a year from now, they're gonna say, Maybe it would have been just easier to use the technology that's been tested and proven and used for things. So, and that doesn't go just for dollars, assets can be settled in the same fashion. Token tokenized assets will be settled, they'll be the rails, you know, the pipelines for tokenization. So that's why I like XRP.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

How is AI bridging over into the crypto space at all? Are there crypto projects that are more AI focused? And if so, where's the utility there?

SPEAKER_00 56:03

I think there's a beautiful intersection that we'll see someday of a marriage between cryptocurrency and AI in that I think there's a day where your smart fridge realizes that you are about to run out of milk and orders it from an Amazon drone that delivers it and has to pay that Amazon drone and the human is out of the transaction. And you can't go and reach in your wallet as a robot and pull out a credit card or pull out these things, and you could settle in a Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. That's the future I see. Or a lawnmower, electric lawn mower out at Pelican Hill where I'm staying mowing things, and he gets from a weather drone, he gets the weather report to see should I be mowing or is it gonna rain? These are all little applications, and I mean when you open your mind to that, they just think about all the other things that the robots will be doing for us. And if they're gonna right now, there's a human in the middle of it, right? Yeah, at some point, and this is the scary part, this is Terminator, right? This is Skynet. Well, is John Connor gonna hate us for this? But at some point, you have to get out of the way of the machines and let the machines run even more efficiently in solving some of our our day-to-day processes and things like that. And that's part of why I think trades are always gonna be great. You can't really build a house with and and weld and do all those types of things. You know, that I had my propane filled up in Arizona because we're off, you know, most almost there's everybody's off grid there. There's not like a you get power, but what like we're on well on and on propane for heating and and for the pool and things like that. And I I was joking with the guy, he's like, Oh, you're a Bitcoin guy, and he's like, an AI. And he's like, Do you think it'll ever replace my job? I'm like, No, I would never trust a robot to fill up this tank of propane because I don't know, like there's there's there's certain things that you won't replace, right? Yeah, um, uh, but yeah, that's the future where they'll and curr cryptocurrency is the perfect at this perfect intersection to make it a commercial transaction that's efficient and and and streamlined, yeah. If if we get it right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:47

So it's 2015, you just learned about Bitcoin, you set up Bitcoin IRA. What were the challenges that you had to get people to even adopt having an IRA and then also putting Bitcoin into their Roth IRA? I mean, you you didn't have, you know, COVID situation, you didn't have all this printing of money to be able to, you know, convince people that the government's printed all this money and they've done all this dumb stuff. Um, I would imagine in 2015, 2016, things were kind of booming. People were probably doing a lot better than they were back in 2008. People were probably making good money. So, what were some of the challenges that you had to get people to adopt Bitcoin IRA and and how how slow did it grow at that time?

SPEAKER_00 58:30

So the first, I mean, we it's funny. I have our first press release where we announced that we hit $500,000 in deposits into our program. And that was how we got the word out that it existed, and Reddit was big. Um, and I have it framed in my office because now like we're up to 12 billion. Like it's but that's small beginnings. That's how you grow, right? Yeah. Our early adopters were guys like Rocket Ron, uh, number 11. Uh, he's a former NASA scientist. Uh, he actually crashed our holiday party in Vegas a few years ago with his wife and brought me a hockey jersey. Uh he made he had made a Bitcoin IRA hockey jersey. I was number one, which technically I wasn't. Well, I guess I was like pre-one. Ed Moy was number one, and he had one made for himself that was number 11 because he's proud to be the 11th Bitcoin IRA holder. Wow. Guys like him uh and groups from Intel, IBM, these I call them my engine nerds, they were really excited about this because they saw the writing on the wall long before all of us. They saw it out there and they said, Man, this is gonna be amazing. I want to get in this early. And the what kind of funds did they have sitting around? Oh, I have a 401k, I have an IRA. Awesome. I'm not retired for 40, 50 years. I think they were already believed the US dollar was uh doomed at some point. Yeah, so they were bought into it. So that was a first wave. Then you do the right things, the right things come, and you're you're a spiritual guy like me. You do the right things and people refer you. We still get today 35% of our businesses referral, and that means you're running a really solid business because people have they are that not only will they like click a button and say, Yeah, I will refer you, but they actually go and actually refer you consistently. Um, I think Ragarron sent like over a thousand people over the years to us. Like it's just anybody he talks to, he's like they become these megaphones. Then that was the those are the intellectuals and the early adopters. Then there was the wave of if you remember Thanksgiving to Christmas of 2017, Bitcoin went from a couple thousand bucks all the way up to 22,000. Yes. Now the greed came in and that that run of retail FOMO came in. Yep. And what I was surprised about was when it crashed back to 6,000. I remember talking to Camille and he's like, so did everybody sell? Is it over? And I was like, no, they're not selling. That was a crazy yeah, people sold. Like there was there were some people that didn't have the intestinal fortitude for it, and there was panic sellers. Yes, but there were so many like Braveheart hold mentality. Yeah, hodl, hodl. Yeah, hodl, hodl, hodl. We actually have hoodies, by the way, yeah. Uh that have that say hodl with our egg egg in them. I was supposed to bring you one, but we're giving them to clients that open up accounts up until the end of the year. Love that. Yes, and we uh you well, your baby's uh 18 months, but we we made onesies kids, yeah. Um, so and this great marketing. And then the hardest waves were actually the regulatory waves. So when that blanketed operation, some people call it operation choke point, whatever letter was sent to all the agencies in the country says don't do anything with crypto, it's dangerous. That was like 18, 19. I couldn't even advertise my business on Google, Facebook. I still can't. LinkedIn does not allow you to advertise cryptocurrency businesses still to this day. Um, phone systems, bank accounts. I was I had to make a I had to make a business, uh, an extra like holding company called digital IRA, just because if I went into any bank in America trying to open up a bank account for Bitcoin IRA, it was no dice. Yes. Those were the really tough hurdles to get over because those are the parts that most businesses don't have to deal with, right? You have to you are it's hard enough to build a business. You gotta run overhead, you gotta control your advertising spend, you gotta hit your row as you gotta all. I mean, you know, all the things that it takes to run a business, and then you add on top the world doesn't like you. It was that that those were more difficult. But that was where when that started happening, you had more of these anti-authority types that were like, Oh, if they don't like Bitcoin, then I like Bitcoin. Yeah, so you would get that, and then of course, COVID changed everything, right? COVID uh everybody was sitting at home with nothing to do, they couldn't even gamble on sports because sports were gam canceled and they're getting stimulus checks left and right and center, and it was like that was really brought in like this whole new era of the GameStop guys that were shorting stocks and going long on crypto. Um, but you'd be surprised, you know, you think Bitcoin is a young man or woman's game. I was on CNBC the first time in 2019 because we had discovered that 75% of our clients were born before 1976. So we actually have an older client base than you would anticipate. Yeah, uh, it's not just a bunch of Gen Z's and millennials, it's it's everybody that's out there. It's you're I mean, we actually I we're starting to have clients pass away because that's what happens, right? They pass in older age. And we had a grandpa, the kids didn't even know that grandpa had bought Bitcoin and put it in his IRA. And you know, when it's inherited, he sets his contingents and his primary beneficiaries. So they come with a death certificate, we give them an account balance, we break it apart, we do all the same things that and they were like, Grandpa had Bitcoin? How can I get more? And they were just like, Grandpa was so cool. Yeah, he had no idea how cool grandpa. Grandpa was a G. They were like, dude, this is amazing. Grandpa was holding it down for you guys, exactly. And normally when you see those inherited moments, and you probably know this from your businesses, the the kids just want the cash and run, and they usually waste it on stuff, right? These all of them were like, Can I open up a account here too? Can I make sure I have it alongside grandpa's Bitcoin that he left behind for me? It's a generational mindset that's happening now. I love that. So this short-term aberration of 126 crashing, and I put that in quotes, back to 96. Maybe we can hit the touch 92. I think there's some support there. This is when in doubt, zoom out, and remember that even a year ago, we were celebrating pop and bottles that we hit 100,000 right after the election. Yep. Time, it's a patience game, too. It's a patience game. It's not a get-rich quick scheme. Just like anything in life, it takes a little time and a little bit of perseverance to make things happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:49

I love that. Chris, this has been absolutely amazing. I mean, I want you to talk to somebody that is sitting out there right now. They feel behind in their retirement. Maybe they're 32 years old, they got 100K saved up, they started late, and they're feeling the pressure of the economy, inflation right now, but they know that they got to make more money to invest more. What would you say to that person? Do they need to focus on an alternative investment? Do they need to grow their earning potential? What should be their focus?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:17

They should be proud of themselves, though. I don't know a lot of 32-year-olds that have 100 grand sitting around. Like, I mean, uh, what is it? I they say it's like 56% of Americans are less than $500 in savings and one tire blowing out or transmission failing or medical emergency away from bankruptcy. And if they get they lose their job, they're two pay cycles away from some big problems. So, first of all, give yourself credit if you're that person. And even if it's not $100,000, if it's $50,000, it's $25,000. You've already learned taught yourself the one thing that Americans suck at. I gotta save. And that's a first big step. You gotta save. And that that means, you know, I always see wealthy people around me, they will invest first, spend second. So when I when a big distribution check comes in or a nice bonus comes in, they don't go to the mall, they go on their portfolio, they add their contributions, they max out the things they need, they get more their money to work, and then what's left over, they'll go spoil themselves with. Yes. And so keep doing what you're doing, save, but also you've got to invest. And if crypto is not for you, still use the tools the government gives you. They don't give us very many. In the 1970s, uh, this is when IRAs were established. And actually, the Roth is named after, I think, Edward or William J. Roth from Delaware that said, we need to incentivize Americans to save more. We were in a savings crisis. They took they took something from us in the 1970s and they gave us something. They gave us IRAs and they took us off the gold standard. Yeah. So they started ruining the money as we know it, but they gave us this nice little tool to use. So use those and get off zero in alternatives. So if it's uh you can get fractional fractionalizations coming, and real estate's always the one that people are like, man, I really want real estate, but it's a little bit more capital intensive. Of course. But you can so get started with a little bit of Bitcoin and make a strategy, make a plan. Okay, here's and here's take the emotion out of it, dollar cost average, whatever you do, whether it's Google stock, Apple stock, Home Depot stock, Bitcoin, Ethereum, take the emotion out of trading by just setting your rules. Okay, I have six thousand dollars I want to invest, I'm gonna put it in my IRA and I want to invest across the next six months. So that means that every month I'm gonna buy a thousand dollars and I'll do it on the same day and I'll buy the same stuff, and now I don't have to watch the charts and go get gray hairs and lose my mind, and it's just systemized. And but a lot of people forget, don't forget to DCA on the way out, too. Yeah, so when the day comes that you want to sell, just because it pops, don't sell it all that day. No, do the same, it's a it's a it's a strategy, it's discipline, just like you in the gym. You don't just show up one day in the gym and start pumping iron, like you gotta stretch and you gotta, you know, you gotta do those things. That's right. So I think it's it's it's consistency and those types of things, and then continue to educate yourself. If there's one thing, you know, I consider myself not like a like I'm not a savant, but I I consider myself a pretty smart guy, and I know a lot of great smart guys. Their their goal is not to be the smartest guy in the room, they like to have the biggest ears in the room because there's so much you can learn from other people. Take Beyond Carlton's, watch his. I mean, you have amazing content, I've told you that. Check out uh Anthony Pompeyon is another one, uh, Brian Decker, Austin Zabak, Natalie Brunel. Uh myself, I'm out. This is my 165th or so interview this year. We're out here trying to preach to you of why you need to do these things. Uh we're not, we're we're just we're just trying to be the megaphone of education and listen and and make sure you because there's this giant find the the the the gap the income gap starts between the ears, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:26

Yes, it does. So oh my gosh. So if someone wants to open up a Bitcoin IRA account today, how can they get started with you guys?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:34

Well, I'm sure that there's a link for Carlton sitting somewhere down in the subject body.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:38

Yes, we'll have the link below this video.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:40

Definitely click that link below uh because there's a special we put together just for you. I told my board I was coming out, I said, I'm gonna meet this guy. He's he's an absolute maniac, brilliant. I just you are cool. Like I when I I've been trying to get in this room with you for six months. So when I finally got in the room, I was like, okay, I gotta go with something in my hands. So um use the link, or if they call, which I as the numbers and I memorize it over the years, 877-936-7175, and mention that they you found out from Carlton's network. Uh, we have a special up to a thousand dollars of savings and rewards if you open your account before the end of the year. Nice. Uh depends on how much you deposit. Plus, a nice little gift. We have the Bitcoin IRA swag store. Most people, when they get into Bitcoin, they want to be proud about it. Team Orange, right? That's right. We've got hats, we've got hodl hoodies, onesies, all kinds of goodies, and you get a free gift for yourself or maybe for one of your family members for the holiday. But call or use the link so that you can get that extra special Carlton Dennis uh savings.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:35

I love that. Guys, listen, we're gonna drop the link right below. We got Chris Klein in the building, an absolute amazing podcast. Let us know in the comments what you thought of today's session, whether or not you're a Bitcoin holder, and what you believe about how you're gonna build your wealth in today's economy. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Chris, thank you for having us. Thanks for having me.