Why Education Is Key to Mass Crypto Adoption

10 Apr 2023 · 1 h 3 min

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Podcast Summary: Raoul Pal: The Journey Man - Episode: Why Education Is Key to Mass Crypto Adoption

Host and Guest

  • Host: Ash Bennington
  • Guest: Ric Edelman, an investor, bestselling author, and founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (DACFP)

Episode Overview In this episode, the discussion focuses on the importance of education in promoting mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Ric Edelman shares insights from his latest book, *The Truth About Crypto*, and articulates what investors should know about the future of decentralized finance (DeFi).

Key Themes and Concepts

  1. Ric Edelman's Background
  2. Career Transition: Ric Edelman left Edelman Financial Engines in late 2021, a firm he co-founded to focus on crypto education, philanthropy, and family office management.
  3. DACFP: Founded to educate financial professionals and consumers about digital assets and blockchain technologies.
  1. The Importance of Education
  2. Edelman emphasizes the lack of understanding among financial advisors regarding cryptocurrencies, creating a knowledge gap that affects both advisors and their clients.
  3. There’s a need to demystify digital assets and help consumers understand investment opportunities, risks, and technologies in the crypto space.
  1. Market Dynamics
  2. Volatility: Edelman explains that cryptocurrency is characterized by extreme price fluctuations, which can be advantageous for certain investment strategies, such as dollar-cost averaging and portfolio rebalancing.
  3. New Asset Class: The advent of cryptocurrencies represents the first new asset class in 150 years, comparable to the introduction of oil in the 1850s.
  1. Regulatory Landscape
  2. Edelman discusses the current regulatory environment, drawing parallels with the state of the stock market in the 1920s, before the establishment of protective regulations.
  3. Concerns about scams and fraud in the crypto space are highlighted, emphasizing the need for regulatory frameworks to promote safe investment practices.
  1. Investment Strategies
  2. Edelman advocates for a cautious approach, suggesting a small allocation (1% to 3%) of an investment portfolio to crypto assets.
  3. Core Assets: He recommends focusing on Bitcoin and Ethereum due to their prominence and potential for growth.
  1. Future of Crypto
  2. The discussion points to the anticipated growth in the tokenization of assets, which would allow for more diverse investment opportunities in the coming years.
  3. The potential for global expansion and integration into everyday commerce is highlighted as a significant driver for the future of digital assets.

Key Takeaways

  • Education is Crucial: A strong foundation in crypto education among financial advisors is essential for guiding clients effectively.
  • Volatility as an Opportunity: While the volatility of cryptocurrencies poses risks, it also creates opportunities for smart investment strategies.
  • Regulatory Clarity Needed: Establishing clear guidelines for the crypto market will protect investors and foster innovation.
  • Diversification is Key: Investors should consider a diversified approach, incorporating cryptocurrencies into their portfolios strategically.

Conclusion Ric Edelman’s insights underscore the transformative potential of cryptocurrencies and the critical need for education in navigating this evolving landscape. As digital assets gain traction, both investors and advisors must enhance their understanding to capitalize on new opportunities effectively.

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This summary encapsulates the main points discussed in the podcast, providing a structured overview for readers interested in the intersection of education and cryptocurrency adoption.

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Transcript

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1:30Rick, welcome back to Real Vision. It's great to be with you again, Ash. Rick, as always, lots to talk about, including, I should grab this book, The Truth About Crypto, and much, much more. We were talking a little bit before we went live today about everything that you've been up to. Give us an update on what you've been doing. Well, at the end of 2021, so what, 16 months ago, I walked away from Edelman Financial Engines, the RAA that my wife and I established way back in 1986. I'm still on the board. I'm still the biggest individual shareholder, but I'm no longer involved in the daily activities of what's going on in the firm.

2:11And I'm now focusing my energy on a variety of other areas. I've started several other companies doing a lot of philanthropic work at Rowan University in particular, along with a lot of Alzheimer's activities. And my family office running our – the only money I manage now is for myself and my wife. And the big focus is crypto education and exponential technologies and the fact that life is changing in unprecedented, profound ways that are affecting every aspect of life on the planet. And helping financial advisors as well as consumers understand these radical, incredible changes and the opportunities, especially the investment opportunities that are resulting from all this.

3:00So I've got DACFP, the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, which is devoted to crypto education. My media company, The Truth About Your Future, where I now operate a daily podcast. I converted my weekly radio show of the last 32 years into now a daily five-day-a-week podcast. My books and webinars, newsletters, blogs, online activities, and so on. So it's pretty busy, pretty exciting. Let's talk a little bit about the journey here. Your background, Edelman Financial Engines, of course, we were chatting about this earlier. The largest broker-dealer in the United States, some over$300 billion in assets under management.

3:41Absolutely massive. Talk a little bit about how, I've heard you tell this story before, but it's always worth, I think, talking about again, how you got into that business. And then we could maybe move it forward into how you found the digital asset space to set the conversation there. Yeah, it's all kind of linked in a consistent journey. Edelman Financial is not a broker-dealer. It's an RIA, a registered investment advisor. We operate as a fiduciary, serving the client's best interests, charging a fee for asset management, no commission. So very, very different from the broker-dealer world of the Merrill Lynch's in the world.

4:16My wife and I started our financial planning practice way back in 1986 because we were young, newly married in our 20s. and like every other newlywed, we wanted to one day buy a home. And so we went to a financial planner for advice on how to do exactly that. It turned out that that advisor was a crook. He told us to lie on our mortgage application, commit a felony in order to qualify for the loan. He should have said to us, you're too young. You don't have enough money to be able to buy a home. You need to save more and prepare. But it's not what he did. We said we wanted to buy a house and he said, well, then you need to lie on your mortgage application.

4:54And that made us realize if that's the quality of the state of advice in the advisory industry, something's really seriously wrong here. And so we decided to teach ourselves how to do this and then teach others what we've learned to help them avoid the bad experience that we had. And that was the foundation of our forming Edelman Financial. and we set about education, recognizing that too many people have too little access to financial advice because advisors tend only to work with rich people. They want to help millionaires get richer. But what about the 90 % of the country that isn't wealthy, that is struggling to get kids through college and care for aging parents while preparing for their own retirement?

5:42And so we built our practice on helping those in America who aspire to financial security, but don't have access to the knowledge, education, information, and advice. And so we built our business on doing educational seminars. That led to my being invited onto the radio, where I was then offered my own show. I was, I think, the first financial planner in the country to be given a radio show. And that ended up becoming a 32-year national program. I was named one of the 100 most important radio talk show hosts in the nation by Talkers Magazine. That led to television series. I did a series of specials and television series for public television and other networks.

6:24Along the way, I wrote books. I'm the most prolific writer in the financial advisory space. I've written 12 books. I'm the New York Times' number one bestselling author. My latest book, which you displayed, thank you, Ash, The Truth About Crypto, was number one debut on Amazon. And it was named Book of the Year by the Society of Business Journalists. So we've always been focusing on education, basically saying to consumers, we'll take anybody as a client. I don't care how much money you have. We have no account minimum, unlike other firms that require you to have a million dollars to invest. Our attitude is if you're willing to follow our advice, we're willing to accept you as a client.

7:00And if you don't have any money, no problem. We'll treat you as a pro bono client. So I think over the years, we've served more clients pro bono than any other firm in the nation to help people who simply want to have a better life for themselves, their children, their communities. And that's been the focus for our business. And that's why I think Edelman Financial has grown to be the largest advisory firm in the country. We had the attitude that if we can't handle the demand, we'll grow to accommodate the demand. People have asked me, how big are you going to get? And I've always said, I'll stop growing when the demand stops coming.

7:36The demand has never stopped because I think our firm has been unique that we'll accept any client, whereas other firms only want to serve rich people. Or once they get 150 clients, they're done. They're not going to grow any further because it's too much work, too much hassle, too much risk. And so we did things that other firms, other advisors have been unwilling to do. And I think that's why we've grown to be the biggest in the country. We're also pretty good at what we do. That helps. So you've been involved not just in running money as the largest RIA in the country, but also with education, as you talk about for decades, nationally syndicated radio show.

8:12What's interesting to me is you're one of the few people in that space who have seen the digital asset revolution coming. It's really interesting. Typically, when you look at the folks who are most passionate about digital assets, they're people who don't necessarily have backgrounds in the traditional financial space in the asset management business. What was it that you saw about digital assets that piqued your attention? Well, I think one of the reasons that I've been popular over the years with my radio show and books and TV and seminars and such is because I'm always focusing on where we're going.

8:43Rather than talking about where we are or lamenting your situation or how did you get in this mess or what have you, our emphasis has always been on the future. And so I've been pretty much widely regarded as a futurist in the financial services field. And I've always been focusing on where is the economy going? Where's the investment world going? Where is the world going? And so that's been just part of our DNA. And it culminated in the 2010s when I got involved with singularity. the notion that advances in technological innovation are now at the point where we are exponentially accelerating our knowledge.

9:27This is all based on Moore's Law, coined back in the 1960s where Gordon Moore, who recently passed away, said that computer technology is doubling in speed about every two years. And what that means is that we have technological capabilities today that we didn't even have two years ago. And that we're going to have things we can do two years from now that we can't do today. And so we're already beginning to see this. Look at ChatGBT, which no one had ever heard of two months ago that is now taking center stage in the media. And rightly so. I'm in it every day. As you should be. This is transformative technology.

10:05I wrote about ChatGPT back in 2017 in my last book, The Truth About Your Future, which was a deep exploration of exponential technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, big data, nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics, neuroscience, fintech, edtech, agtech, and how these technologies are radically changing life on the planet. most people unaware of this fact. And I provided the financial planning angle of this. What does it mean for your college, your career? What does it mean for homeownership and marriage? What does it mean for estate planning and most importantly, investment management?

10:42And in that conversation is blockchain and digital assets. That is one of the most impactful of all exponential technologies. I was first introduced to Bitcoin back in 2012. And my reaction was the same as everybody's when you first hear about this. Huh? What? Digital money? The heck is that? What do we need that for? Yeah. But unlike most people who tended to just dismiss Bitcoin out of hand when they first heard about it, I recognized that some pretty smart people are talking about it and I needed to learn more. And after spending a year of research, I began to realize two things. Number one, blockchain technology and Bitcoin and other digital assets that that technology allows is perhaps one of the most transformative innovative technologies ever, probably as big a deal as the internet itself was back in the 90s.

11:36Second, most financial advisors and investors are unaware of the power of this tech. And so I created in 2015 DACFP, the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, to serve as a crypto education company to teach advisors and investors about this transformative tech. We all lament the fact that we missed the internet. We didn't invest in Google the way we should have and all the other dot-coms that today, Amazon and Apple and on and on and on. And I'm determined not to miss this one. And that's what blockchain and digital assets represents today. It's internet 3.0. And it represents what might be one of the most transformative technologies and biggest investment opportunities of a generation.

12:29And that's what we do is just teach people how this tech works, how to understand it, how to figure out whether you should invest. And if so, how much to invest, where to invest, and how to avoid the scams and frauds that are pervasive, especially in an environment of a lack of regulatory protection, which is where we are right now. This is the 1920s of the stock market where there wasn't an SEC. There was no Investment Company Act or Investment Advisor Act yet. And so we need to protect ourselves while we learn and explore and engage. And so DACFP is now the oldest, largest provider of crypto education.

13:09It's also objective because we're not a fund provider. We're not a product sponsor. We aren't trying to sell you anything. We don't manage money. And so we are strictly education for the industry, for individual investors, for the crypto community as well. And our big claim to fame is that we've created the certificate in blockchain and digital assets, which we've now massively expanded, just introduced this last month. We now have four separate tracks for advisors, for professionals, back office, for the crypto community, and for investors and consumers. and it's the biggest, broadest program.

13:46We have graduates from 38 countries and everybody gives it rave reviews, world-class faculty, online self-study. It's really terrific program that'll get you the content, the knowledge you need to be able to effectively engage in this new asset class. Hey everyone, we're gonna take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.

14:10Rick, let's talk a little bit about the state of play right now among financial professionals with digital assets. What are the reactions that you're getting? And give us a sense of how that context is broadly being formed as folks who are in the traditional financial space begin to familiarize themselves with this new technology. What I was not prepared for, Ashley, was how violently emotional the subject of crypto is. It's just another asset class. I don't know why people have such strong opinions about it. Loving it, these Bitcoin enthusiasts, these frankly, in many cases, anarchists wanting to bring down the global economic system versus the crypto haters who think that this is worthless and nothing of value except for criminals.

14:59I don't understand why there's so much emotion. It's just another asset class. It's the first new asset class in 150 years. Last time we had a new asset class was the discovery of oil in the 1850s. But it's just another asset class. And I don't understand why it has so much emotion. What is interesting is that this is an asset class that was not invented by Wall Street, unlike stocks and bonds. And so Wall Street wasn't the first to adopt. And many have regarded it a competitive threat. And maybe that's part of the reason people are either against it or, frankly, afraid of it. But it's just another asset class, just like oil, gold, baseball cards, rare coins, exotic cars, artwork.

15:48It's just another asset class. And so I try to cut through the emotion of it and helping people realize that if you truly believe in diversification, then you want to own every asset class as part of a diversified portfolio because the more asset classes you own, the lower you get your risk. This is just modern portfolio theory that Markowitz created back in the 1950s. So I don't understand the volatility of emotion that this asset class creates. That was the one thing that surprised me. And that has caused people to shut their minds to this and dig in their heels. Warren Buffett kind of amazed me in this conversation.

16:28He just said this. He's been saying this for years, but he said it again just last week. He said there are three reasons he hates crypto. And reason number three was I don't understand it. How can you hate something you don't understand? And how can you use that as a reason for arguing against it? I mean, Warren, if you don't understand it, here's an idea. Go learn about it. You're a smart guy. You won't be hard. Try reading my book. And so it drives me crazy that people form incredibly strong opinions about crypto while admitting they know nothing about it. I don't get it. So I simply challenge people to learn more about it to help you decide whether or not a client should invest.

17:11And if so, how much of the portfolio? And if so, how do you invest? How do you manage the assets? Because I'll tell you this, if you're a financial advisor and you are having your head in the sand about crypto, if you're unable to explain to a client what is Bitcoin, all you're saying to your client is, I'm going to deny myself a new innovative technology. And if I don't know anything about Bitcoin, what else do I know anything about? How can you believe anything I say if I'm not able to explain effectively this conversation? I mean, the only other asset that also generates a lot of emotion are annuities.

17:47Advisors feel pretty strongly about those. We love them. We hate them. But even if you are in the camp of hating annuities, I'm willing to bet that you understand how they work. You can explain the beneficiary versus ownership. You can explain the taxes. You can explain the actuarial basis on which annuities are priced. Even if you hate them, you can explain them to your client and explain why they should or should not invest, how much to invest, where they should buy them. You can do all that as an advisor because that's your job. My challenge simply is you should be able to do the same thing with Bitcoin.

18:23I don't care whether you like it or not. I'm not in the business of trying to convince you to buy Bitcoin. I'm in the business of trying to get you to understand how to explain Bitcoin to your client so you can do your job for them, whether they should buy it or not. And it's really that simple. So that's the one thing that surprised me. And my job is simply to help people overcome this and help firms overcome it. And I'll give you an idea of how crazy the scenario is. I was at the Financial Planning Association's annual conference in Seattle just a couple of months ago. And I gave a session on understanding blockchain and digital assets, an educational session.

18:59And I'm in the exhibit hall wandering around talking to people. And I came upon an advisor who works for a major wire house, one of the big firms. I'm not going to mention their name, household name. And I said to him, we're just chatting. And he said, are you giving a speech today? And I said, yeah, I'll be speaking in a couple of hours in room such and such. And I'm going to be talking about crypto. Do you plan to come to my session? And he said, I can't go. If I go to your session, my manager told me I'll be fired. Oh, my God.

19:32It's like, oh my goodness. Have we become the same as communist China, where we are not going to allow people to get free knowledge and access to information that might be of value to your practice and your client? That's the state of where many of Wall Streeters are, and it's doing a huge disservice. And here's why. 22 % of consumers in the United States, 22%, one out of five own Bitcoin today, which means 20 % of your clients, probably even more, own Bitcoin right now. They didn't buy it through you because you won't help them. And because they're doing it on their own, we've seen so many scams and frauds, odds are good they're doing something wrong.

20:15They own too much of it. They're buying it on a scary platform like FTX. They're getting themselves in trouble. They're not dealing with the taxes. They're not dealing with the estate planning correctly because they are not able to access your knowledge and advice and care and support. We're doing our clients a disservice by staying ignorant on this subject. And in a recent survey, six out of 10 investors said that if they can't get advice on crypto from their advisor, they're going to go find a new advisor. So you're not only denying yourself the AUM, you're running the risk of losing your client because you're showing your client you're not staying current with the state of the art of investment opportunities in America today.

20:54It's a lose-lose. Whereas if you embrace crypto, at least crypto knowledge, you can serve your client, you can help them without ever recommending Bitcoin, provide the value that your client needs and expects, and show that you're able to deliver services to them that as a fiduciary, you ought to be doing. Yeah. I guess the only other asset that has a similar and a much lower level polarizing capacity is gold. We see this in the space. And it's interesting because many people, particularly on the Bitcoin side of the equation, see Bitcoin as a kind of digital gold, a kind of digital off the grid asset that can not be as subjective to, for example, central bank currency debasement as they would frame it.

21:38Give us a little sense of how you think about these assets and how you think about them comparatively. Obviously, a lot of difference in the culture around Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of the nature of the functionality of the asset itself. Talk a little bit about those assets more broadly. Yeah, there are a lot of people in the crypto community who equate Bitcoin with gold. They call it digital gold. I'm not a huge fan of that analogy. I do understand it. I can see where there are parallels between Bitcoin and gold. And the benefit of Bitcoin being digital is that it has a lot of advantages that gold doesn't have.

22:18Portability, for example, limited supply, store of value. There are a lot of similarities. Infinite divisibility, which is an interesting one that doesn't apply to a physical asset like gold. Absolutely right. And so I get the analogy. And the fact that people are looking for an inflation hedge, they want an asset that is disconnected from the financial markets and government control of issuance of currency and so on. There are a lot of similarities. And it's all understandable. But I think Bitcoin is so much more, which makes a lot of sense because it's built in a digital world. And we are a digital society today on a global basis.

22:56McKinsey says by the end of the decade, 70 % of the world's GDP will be digital. Wow, that's a pretty amazing prediction. And you can't ascribe any of that to gold. You could argue, in fact, that everybody in the world who wants gold already owns it. Whereas in Bitcoin, only 400 million people own Bitcoin out of a population of 8 billion. We're talking 5 % of the world only owns Bitcoin. And as that number rises radically, the price of Bitcoin will rise radically because of the supply-demand equation. So there's a lot of argument for Bitcoin as an asset class. You don't have to believe in it to invest in it.

23:40you know, if you truly believe in diversification, your portfolio already contains assets that you don't like. That's the nature of diversification. Liking an asset is not a prerequisite for investing in it. And Bitcoin is undeniably a new asset class. And when I say Bitcoin, I mean crypto as a whole. So you need to figure out how you want to proceed because there are now so many ways. You know, 10 years ago, it was Bitcoin or bust. There was nothing but Bitcoin. Ethereum came along, and you mentioned that, because Ethereum does things Bitcoin cannot do. And now, by extension, there's 20 ,000 digital coins and tokens out there.

24:24Most of them are totally unnecessary. Some are outright scams. Many are just marketing shticks. But there's probably a couple of dozen that have a legitimate commercial application that solve a problem in business that will survive because they do good. They are of value. And you just need to emphasize and focus on those. And people sometimes get a little confused by that, Ash. Why do we need more than Bitcoin? What's the point? How is Ethereum different? And my analogy is really very simple. It's like shoes in your closet. We all have more than one pair of shoes. We have shoes we wear to the opera.

25:01And then we have shoes we wear to the gym. Different pair of shoes do different jobs. and likewise, in the world of digital assets, Bitcoin does one thing. It's a store of value. It's highly secure. Ethereum does a different thing. Ethereum allows us to send our digital money only upon completion of a task. In other words, if I send you my Bitcoin, you receive it instantly, but I might not want you to. I might want you to get my Bitcoin only when you do something for me, like give me the deed to your house or give me concert tickets, or you get my money only if a certain team wins a sporting event, or only if certain somebody wins an election, or only if the weather hits a certain temperature, or only if it rains.

25:46And if then contract. And oh, if then contracts, right? Contracts are used in business all the time. This is a fundamental way commerce gets conducted. With Ethereum, you can create that self-executing contracts. No lawyers involved. It's embedded into the code so that money gets transferred upon the completion of a promise or a task. Bitcoin can't do that, but Ethereum can. That's why Ethereum was invented. So Ethereum provides a function in commerce that Bitcoin does not do. Ethereum are the running shoes for the gymnasium. Bitcoin is for the opera. And there are dozens of other examples of other coins that do different things for different purposes.

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26:30And this is what people need to understand about the technology. At the end of the day, it's just software. And if you believe in the power of software, how can you not want to be interested in the most advanced software of the era, which is blockchain? Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing.

26:57Yeah. One of the other things that struck me about your book is how comprehensive it is. You're writing about this from a lot of different angles. You write a lot about the technology to explain how it works. You write about the legal regulatory compliance framework, which is, of course, very important with the news flow that we've seen. You've been writing about things like the tax implications, which I think are little understood in this space. Give us a sense of when you looked at this book, when you began the research process, the holistic categories that you wanted to cover and why you thought they were important.

27:28Yeah, I got myself annoyed when I was writing the book. I can't believe how long it was. How much is there to talk about with blockchain and Bitcoin? And then as I kept writing, I kept realizing, oh, but I got to mention this and I got to mention that. And it's like, oh, geez, look at this. This is the second longest book I've ever written because it's a brand new emerging tech. I mean, imagine writing a book on the internet. This is internet 3.0. And so it's a big deal. You got to explain to people what it is and how it works because it's a brand new terminology, staking, mining, airdrops, forks, wallets.

28:04You've got to explain what this is. Second, you've got to explain the investment angle of this. Then you've got to explain the financial planning angle of this, estate planning and tax planning and so on. And then you've got to explain the regulatory angle of this. So it just kept going on and on and on. And because I recognize that most folks are not technologists and they're not investment experts, I need to write in a style that is accessible. It's got to be fun and interesting and entertaining, which is a trademark of my writing style, taking really dull, bland, boring, technical topics and turning them into plain English that's interesting and entertaining as well as informative.

28:49I try to make it so that even the footnotes are funny with a lot of cartoons and jokes and quotes and so on. And so the book just kind of took a life of its own. The good news is you don't have to read the whole book start to finish. It's organized in a way you can drop into an individual chapter immediately for a given subject that you might care about. And so that's kind of why the book just got a life of its own and why it was named one of the best crypto books ever and one of the best broad business books ever written. So I'm really excited about how well it's being received. Speaking of the audience, I want to take this opportunity to ask our audience to put down their questions in the chat.

29:29Wherever you're watching, we're going to ask the best ones on the air later in this show. Remember, Real Vision members take priority. But the good news is Real Vision membership is free. You can go to realvision.com forward slash crypto to sign up. That's realvision.com forward slash crypto to sign up. So, Rick, let's talk a little bit about the trajectory that you see this moving in the future. You've talked about the skepticism in the traditional financial services space among advisors, RIAs, FAs, among folks on Wall Street more generally. What's your sense of what's happening right now, where we're headed in this direction?

30:02Well, Bitcoin has two primary features and two secondary features. So let me tackle them and you'll see the answer to your question. The two primary features, number one, is incredible volatility. The reason that Bitcoin is getting so much attention is that it is the best performing asset in history. 40 million percent. That's how much it's earned since inception. No other asset is done as well. Now that party's over. We're not going to see a 40 million percent gain again. So don't invest with that in mind. Second, in addition to the incredibly high rate of return historically, we've also had an incredibly high level of volatility.

30:48We all pay attention to last year when Bitcoin fell 70 percent of value. What most people don't realize is that that is the seventh time that that's happened to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an incredibly volatile asset class. It routinely rises or falls 10 % in a day. I mean, that's what the stock market typically does in a year. So it is very, very volatile. A lot of people use this as an argument to stay away, which makes no sense. If you believe in portfolio rebalancing, dollar cost averaging, you have to love volatility. Because without volatility, you can't do rebalancing or dollar cost averaging.

31:23Explain what that means, Rick, for people who don't know. Well, rebalancing says that, you know, you got, let's say, simple example, two assets. We're going to put half our money in each one. Well, we know that they're going to perform differently. One of them will do better than the other. We just don't know which one. So you turn around one day and your 50-50 portfolio has become 60-40. One of them has done better than the other, and it now makes up more of your money. Well, this isn't the portfolio you wanted, 60-40. If you don't fix it, it's going to become 70-30, 80-20, 90-10. And oh my goodness, you're not diversified at all.

31:58You've got all your money in one place. And if that crashes, you're broke. So you need to rebalance. What do you do? You take the 60-40, you sell some of the 60 back to 50. And you buy some of the 40 up to 50 to bring back the original portfolio you wanted, 50-50. That's rebalancing. Well, the only way rebalancing works is if you have assets that are volatile, that go up and down in value, so that as they do this, you take advantage of it. Think about it. If you have an asset 50-50 that becomes 60-40 and you sell the 60 back down, you're selling at a profit. You're locking in your gain. And if you're buying at 40, you're buying while it's low.

32:39Buy high, sell low. That's what most people do, and that's how they go broke. Instead of buy high, sell low, sell high, buy low, turn it around inside out. And that's how you get rich. And interestingly, this has the effect that you were talking about earlier in terms of diversification, which you wind up doing is selling the winners and buying the losers, which in some senses is kind of counterintuitive. It is because people love to buy what made money before. We all love to buy the past winners. That's a great way to go broke. So you're right. And this is why smart advisors routinely engage in rebalancing.

33:14but you have to have volatile assets to take advantage of it. The second piece is dollar cost averaging, which says, I've got money to invest, but I'm not going to invest in a single lump sum today. Because with your dumb luck, you invest today, the market crashes tomorrow. So with dollar cost averaging, you invest slowly over time. Instead of investing$1 ,000 today, you invest$100 a month over 10 months. That gives you the average result of the 10-month period. And due to the way the math works, you end up with the lowest average cost, which produces a built-in profit. Dollar cost averaging is the most effective investment strategy ever discovered.

33:51And Bitcoin allows you to take advantage of it because you need a volatile asset for dollar cost averaging to work. So if you believe in diversification, you need to volatile assets and the more volatile asset you can find, the better you're going to do. And it's really that simple. Well, I was just going to say, if you're looking for a volatile asset, crypto is the right place for you. You're exactly right. So those are the two major themes. It's made a ton of money. It has a tremendous potential for further growth. People aren't talking about Bitcoin growing 10 or 20%. They're talking about growing 10x, 20x, 50x over the next decade.

34:28So it has tremendous upside potential. And it really helps with portfolio management of dollar cost averaging, rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, and more. The minor themes, which are equally important. Number one, there's a massive amount of fraud and abuse in crypto, largely because there isn't any regulation or insufficient level of regulation to protect consumers and investors. So you've got to be careful. And second, there is a huge level of attention in Washington by both Congress and the administration to improve the regulatory environment because of all the fraud and abuse that has now been acknowledged, culminating in FTX last year.

35:10So we've already got seven bills in Congress right now. We've got the SEC, the CFTC, FINRA, FinCEN, the IRS, Treasury, even the Department of Defense is engaged in this. So there's a lot going on, which is great news. We've been clamoring for this for years in the crypto community. Please give us rules of the road. Let the honest operators engage. Let's keep out the crux. We solved this problem in the stock market in the 1930s after the crash of 29. That's where we are with crypto today. We're in the 20s. We need to get into the 30s. We need to build the rules of the road for the protection of investors so that we can legitimately grow this technology for the benefit of the economy.

35:56And we'll have those rules probably within the next two years. And that's great news. Does it give you any pause when you see some of these ongoing investigations, for example, by SEC and CFTC, the suits that have been filed in federal court? Questions about the nature of what is and isn't a security, which I know you cover in this book. The Wells notice recently being served on Coinbase. There are a lot at the moment of these at least shorter term headwinds for the space from a regulatory, legal and compliance perspective. Yeah, there's been a lot of controversy over actions taken over the past couple of months by the SEC in particular, and more recently with the FDIC, the OCC, and the Fed.

36:44We've seen the SEC engaging, and now the CFTC as well, doing regulation by enforcement. In the absence of rules, they're just filing lawsuits. They've already extracted$100 million fines from a couple of companies. They've now issued, as you said, another Wells notice against Coinbase. And it's extraordinarily frustrating because these legitimate companies – I mean, Coinbase is a publicly traded company that was given approval by the SEC to be a publicly traded company. And yet the SEC is now saying three years later, oh, we don't like what you're doing. Yeah, this is a point that Brian Armstrong made in his tweet, basically saying, hey, listen, you knew what our business model was when we put it in our S1, the filing to go public.

37:32And now there seems to be some confusion about it. Yeah, and this is just – this is Monday morning quarterbacking. This is changing the rules retroactively. It's completely unfair, especially when you acknowledge that Coinbase has gone to the SEC multiple times saying, here's what we want to do. Please give us clarity as to whether we can do it and how we can do it. And the SEC, instead of giving answers, has filed lawsuits against them. This is not helpful to the economy, and it's not helpful to innovation. It's not helpful to job creation. It doesn't provide any consumer or investor protection.

38:02It's just a turf battle with Gensler trying to win a broader slate of regulatory authority against other regulatory agencies he's in competition with, such as the CFTC. So this doesn't do anybody any good, and it's getting a lot of people very angry, including on Capitol Hill. So we have to work our way through nonsense like this. Simultaneously, we've seen the OCC, FDIC, and the Fed doing this with banks. They shut down Silvergate Bank. They shut down Signature Bank. They shut down SVB, and now they're going after First Republic because those banks are doing business with crypto companies. Again, there's no legitimate basis for this from what anybody has been able to explain or articulate.

38:47And it's just demonstrating that the regulators are run amok with an attitude and viewpoint that is beyond their regulatory mandate, that is beyond what Congress has instructed them to do. And they're doing it without warning with adverse implication for the overall economy. Look at the fear that these agencies have created in the banking system in the past month. This isn't doing anybody any good when you behave in this way. So we need calmer heads to prevail. I'm, in fact, in a meeting with the SEC later this week, joining several others in an effort to talk about the regulatory approach that they're taking.

39:25There's a lot of movement, a lot of help. A lot of folks want to get it right. And we're hopeful that the agencies will participate in this so that we can have it both ways. Allow the innovation while protecting investors. We think that this can be done effectively. And worst case scenario, if the regulators won't allow it to happen in the US, they're not going to kill crypto. They're just going to drive crypto offshore. That doesn't help investors. It doesn't help the American economy. It shutters innovation. The Bush administration did this with stem cell research 25 years ago. They didn't shut down stem cell research.

40:05All they did was shift it to South Korea and Israel. We lost out on the tech. How does that help anybody? So we need calm, cool heads to prevail with a modicum of rationality and maturity. And I'm hopeful that that's where we're going to end up. And by the way, we should say this is something that is at the very sort of heartbeat of American innovation and global competitiveness. If you think about two of the industries that have led the way for the last 30 years, it's been the Silicon Valley, high tech, and it's been Wall Street financial services. This is a kind of a mashup between those two industries.

40:42And you really have to wonder about the risks to the American economy if this goes offshore. Well, I think the fundamental reason that this has been occurring is because there are many people who are threatened by this technology, partly because they don't understand it and partly because their business model is threatened by it. And guess what? Warren Buffett falls into both of those camps. He's admitted he doesn't understand it. He's also the biggest investor in Wells Fargo and a bunch of other banks. Jamie Dimon, who is also a vocal critic of crypto, operates one of the largest banks in America.

41:15They are fearful that this technology is an existential threat to their business model. They're right. It is. And so rather than improve their own business model to better serve depositors and savers and investors, they are going to regulators behind closed doors demanding that the regulators shut down these businesses. it's short-sighted, it's self-serving, it is not going to work, and all they're doing is creating turmoil in the broader marketplace. So we need to recognize that, yeah, the ingrained institutions of the day always hate innovative change. The horse and buggy industry did everything they could to prevent automobiles.

41:58Yeah. You had mentioned in the book that automobiles were originally called horseless carriages, this idea that you kind of metamorphosize from the things that you know to the things that you don't understand, even if it's not necessarily the most appropriate comparison. And it's human nature. We get it. People tend to fear what they don't understand. They tend not to want to disrupt the status quo. People tend to act, unfortunately, too often selfishly. I'm more interested in me than I am in the greater good. It's understandable. We get it. But we need to acknowledge it so that others can prevent that from being the rule of the day.

42:35Boy, Rick, we've got a lot of questions coming in. This one is right in your wheelhouse from Ralph Humphries on our platform. What issues are RIAs now encountering on the compliance front as far as investing in digital assets? For example, custody, liquidity, suitability, et cetera. Great question. It is a great question, and it emanates from the fact that most people, and I will use that word most, not merely many, overcomplicate crypto. We tend to look at Bitcoin because that's the elephant in the room. It's the best known. It's the first, the oldest, the biggest. And people are looking at how do I buy crypto and how do I do that in a regulatory compliant way?

43:15And many will conclude there isn't a regulatory compliant way to do it, and therefore we're going to stay out. This is what many firms say to their advisors. We don't know how to allow you to do Bitcoin compliant safe. Therefore, you can't. What they fail to realize is that that's old school thinking. That viewpoint was accurate seven years ago, but it's not accurate today. Today, there are so many different ways to invest in crypto that have nothing to do with compliance risks. In other words, there's two kinds of crypto today, not just one. You've got the coins and tokens, which is the pure original way to do this.

43:59But now you also have securities of crypto. Think about the analogy of gold. How many advisors tell their clients to buy gold? Nobody. You're going to tell your client to buy gold bullion? Gold coins? How are you going to execute that? Where are you going to custody? Nobody tells their clients to buy gold. You know what they tell them to do? Buy the gold ETF. That's a security. Oh, the underlying asset inside the ETF is gold, but it's a security. And because it's an ETF, it's an ordinary ETF, just like all other ETFs. No compliance department in the country has a concern with the gold ETF. You can buy it in any brokerage account.

44:44Your clients are familiar with how to buy an ETF. This is just another one. It's thematic. It's a specific segment that provides added diversification from stocks and bonds, but it's just an ETF. There are now crypto ETFs. We now have hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds. There are SMAs and TAMPs. There are IRA accounts. There are so many different ways you can give your client exposure to crypto inside a security, which has the same rules, regulations that every compliance officer is very familiar with that has nothing to do with opening a Coinbase account to buy Bitcoin. Yet it gives your client access to the asset class, lets them check the box to add the diversification, yet you can do it with rebalancing and dollar cost averaging and tax loss harvesting.

45:39You can debit your fee. You can do everything with portfolio reporting, tax record keeping, simple and easy. So when an advisor or a firm says to me, how do I do crypto in an environment where I don't understand custody? I don't understand the rules and the regs and the reporting. My answer is don't do it that way. Do it this way instead. You'll discover it's incredibly simple and easy. You already know how to do it. You're doing it every day with every other asset class. You're doing it with gold. You're doing it with oil. You're doing it with real estate. You're doing it with commodities. This is just another thematic approach, the way you do everything else.

46:17It's not scary once you begin to understand this. And so I'm doing a lot of consulting these days with firms, RAA firms, broker dealers, banks, even pension funds and endowments, helping them understand that doing crypto isn't scary anymore if you do it within the parameters that now exist, that didn't exist even four years ago, but they exist today. And that's the approach people need to take. They need to understand this isn't scary. This is as routine and easy as adding a gold allocation to your portfolio. And do you see us moving to a world where we're going to see greater securitization of these assets so that they can be purchased through RIAs, through traditional brokerage accounts, and through other mechanisms of managed financial accounts?

47:06Absolutely. We are at the very beginning of this. It's called tokenization. And every asset class is going to be tokenized over the next five years. It's astonishing what is going on. and some of the biggest brands in the business, Fidelity, Schwab, Franklin Templeton, GlobalX, they are building unbelievable infrastructures for the tokenization of asset classes. Right now, we have 15 or 20 major asset classes. I mean, think about it. Stocks, bonds, real estate, oil and gas, gold and precious metals, and so on. There's 15 or 20 of these, and your portfolio has them. in 10 years, there's going to be 15 or 20 ,000 asset classes because we can tokenize anything.

47:55We'll be able to tokenize commercial real estate. We're going to be able to tokenize artwork, rare wine, exotic cars. We're going to be able to tokenize salaries. You want to be a fan of a Hollywood actor or a professional athlete, you're going to be able to invest in their career so that But as they make more money, you'll profit as well. You're going to be able to invest in your favorite music. You're a big fan of Bruce Springsteen. You're going to be able to invest in Born to Run. So every time that song is played on Spotify, you get a cut of the royalty. This tokenization is going to unleash incredible investment opportunity.

48:34And we haven't seen nothing yet. In many ways, Rick, what it sounds like is almost the Bowie bonds from the 1990s on rocket fuel. I guess the question is, I mean, the technology is certainly out there to do this. Obviously, it's maturing every day. There's still some issues with it around security, around stability. These are getting sorted out, perhaps not as quickly as those of us who are passionate about the space would like, but it is getting sorted out. And I'm curious, it seems as though the bottleneck there is going to be around the legal, regulatory, and compliance component of that. Do they become full securities?

49:11Are there some sort of tokenization mechanism that isn't quite a security? Does it come under some sort of almost like Reg A type of registration? I mean, there's just a lot of open questions for that. How do you think about that? What are the folks you talk to telling you about it? This is extraordinarily complex, and we need to go slow. We need to get it right, again, for consumer and investor protection. I'm a member of the Global Blockchain Convergence, which is a group of about 200 lawyers from around the world. Almost all of them are outside the U.S. working with governments worldwide in the development of the regulation of crypto.

49:44Because this is a digital asset that trades globally 24-7. So think about the legal implications of this. You buy a token, Ash, that represents an asset. This is a digital token. You buy it on a digital exchange, whether it's Coinbase or a DeFi exchange like Metamask. You're buying it from somebody selling it. You don't know who they are. You don't know where they're located. Something goes wrong in the transaction. Who do you sue? Who do you file a complaint with? Who has jurisdiction? The three of you, the buyer, the seller, and the platform on which the trade occurred, could be in three separate jurisdictions around the world.

50:40Whose laws apply? In what court do you file? There are no answers to these questions yet. Because most governments haven't written any rules yet for their own jurisdictions, let alone figuring out treaties between other jurisdictions. So we have a long way to go in figuring all this out. Here's a question that comes to us talking about the rules of the road. It comes from, and in the international component as well, I should say, from Mike Gannon on platform. Hi, Rick. Just been looking at your course content. And then he posts an emoji of the champion trophy. Obviously, he's a fan. He says, almost all of it, except for the tax is international.

51:24Have you thought about adding key regs from around the world? So when someone from Australia or the UK or wherever signs up, a bot can allocate the relevant regs. Boy, Rick, this is the reward for a job well done is the request for 100 more jobs well done. They want you to expand and give specifics by regulation. And thank you for that compliment. And yes, that is going to be the fifth track that we're going to launch later this year for international users or international students of our CERT program. I am as surprised as anybody that we have had people enroll in our course from 38 countries, which just shows the incredible hunger for this content and knowledge.

52:08And we've talked with folks in Japan, in Taiwan, in Saudi Arabia, in Dubai, in Ireland, in Germany, England, France, who say they can't get content. They can't get knowledge or education. The only people tending to provide that content are the product sponsors who are trying to sell you something. The content is either not very good, not very complicated, or it's biased. So we're it. We're kind of like the only place for objective content. Even the tried and true, the CFP board, the

52:42CFA designation, FINRA, the SEC, none of them provide crypto content. They've all outsourced us. We're the official crypto education partner for the CFP board, the FPA, IAA, MMI, NAPFA, XY Planning, IARFC. We're the official crypto education partner for Fidelity, for Schwab, for dozens of organizations, because they all realize they need to provide training to their audience. They don't have the in-house expertise, and so they're outsourcing it to us, and we're happy to do it. We've created a lot of white label programming for a lot of companies and on and on. But most of our content is generic.

53:22What is Bitcoin? That answer is applicable globally. But some of the content in our CERT course is unique to US. Regulation, taxation. If you live in Europe, that content isn't of terrible much value to you. So we're creating a new course, a new track for ex-US, people who live outside the United States that will have taxation and regulation focused on their jurisdiction, Europe, Australia, the Far East, Canada, Mexico, and South America and such. And we're going to be launching that later this year. Yeah, it really is. We see the same thing here at Real Vision, Rick. It's just an astonishingly global audience.

54:00We get questions from all over the world, viewers from all over the world, interest from all over the world. And I think that's just something about the nature of this technology that draws people in. This truly global instantaneous money moving around the world at the speed of light. There's just a lure that this has that brings in an international audience. OK, I wanted to get in one more question. Oh, this is a funny one. This comes from Paul English. Rick, care to share what crypto is included in your personal portfolio? And if not, give some general guidance around how you think about that.

54:30Yeah. I advocate in my book and elsewhere that your portfolio allocation should be 1 % of assets. That's it. Just 1%. And people are sometimes surprised to hear that. They're like, if you're such a deep into this space and so bullish about it, why are you telling people just 1 %? And there are two reasons. Number one, it's still a new and emerging asset class, still incredibly volatile, still a lot of unknowns regulatorily. Wild West, fraud and scam. So Bitcoin could still blow up. It could still become worthless. So a 1 % allocation won't hurt you. If it becomes worthless, it'll annoy you, but it won't interfere with your future financial security.

55:10On the other hand, if it does do what a lot of people think it might, 10x, 20x, 50x, you don't need a big allocation to have a material impact on your total portfolio. 1 % is plenty. I'm not the only one saying this. Yale did a study. They said that Yale said 3 % allocation. The CFA Institute did a study. They said 2.5%. Everybody is pretty much in agreement, low single digits. It's plenty. Having said that, I am personally overweighted. I don't disclose the extent, but I am deep in this space, have been since 2012 because of my knowledge and my financial ability. and my wife and I's personal goals, we can afford to be overweight and we are.

55:59What do we do? I'll give you my advice for, you know, we do a lot, more than I think most folks should try. But I will tell you what I generally recommend to folks, what your crypto allocation ought to be. Number one, just Bitcoin. It's the biggest, it's the oldest. It'll be last man standing if it does blow up. Number two, Ethereum, the second biggest coin, which has, I believe, a greater level of commercial application than Bitcoin. I personally own more Ethereum than Bitcoin, but not by much because the two are a big deal. You could build a portfolio of just those two, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

56:40Together, they represent 70 % of the total crypto market. They're the Coke and Pepsi of crypto. Just do the two of them and call it a day. Third, if you want to be more diversified, I'm a big fan of the Bitwise Top 10 Crypto Index Trust, which is a grantor trust. There's a lot of details to how these things work. I'm an investor in Bitwise. This is Hunter Horsley's shop. We've had him on many times. And this is the, you know, they call it the S &P 500 of crypto. It's the top 10 coins market cap weighted. So Bitcoin and Ethereum represent 70 % of the fund. And then you've got eight other coins that represent fast growers because the biggest won't necessarily be the fastest growing.

57:23So that gives you more diversification. But there are details, risks you need to be aware of. I've written a lot about this. You can go to my website at DACFP.com to read about the risks of grant or trusts. Third, or rather fourth, you could build just a big, fat portfolio of a variety of different ways, SMAs, TAMPs, VC, PE. Crypto ETFs, GlobalX, Schwab, Fidelity all offer crypto ETFs. There's a couple of dozen of them out there. So there's a wide variety of ways to do this. And what you should do, how you should do it, how much to invest, where to invest, talk with your financial advisor. And if your advisor isn't willing to engage, if they don't know how to engage, if their first reaction is dismissiveness, go find another advisor.

58:14And by the way, we should say all of these topics covered amply in this book, The Truth About Crypto. I found it very interesting myself, and I was incredibly impressed by how comprehensive it was. I have to tell you, Rick, when I started reading this book, I'd thought about writing a comprehensive book like this. Every time I thought about it, it was emotionally exhausting. I'm thrilled that you've written it so that I don't have to. I'm happy to have helped you out there, Ash. Rick, you know, we've blown through our time so quickly here. Final thoughts, key takeaways that you'd like to leave our audience with.

58:46I guess I'd end with where we started. This is an astonishing new innovative technology that is going to radically alter the nature of commerce on a global scale. You're going to own crypto. It's only your choice of when. You can wait 10 years when it's incredibly obvious, just like having General Motors stock in your portfolio is incredibly obvious today. you're not going to get rich or change the world by buying GM stock. But if you bought GM stock in the 1930s, you would have changed your life. So that's where crypto is. You can wait, buy it later, it'll make sense. Or you can buy it now, much riskier, much more uncertain, but with a much greater potential for impacting your future.

59:32It's entirely up to you. But either way, learn about this. Make sure you're working with an advisor who understands this and let us help you. We have a course for investors. We have a course for advisors. And I encourage you to go through our certificate course. You can learn more about it at DACFP.com. Rick Edelman, always a pleasure to have you on Real Vision. Thanks, Ash. Anytime. Thanks for watching, everybody. What's up, revolutionaries? Thanks for tuning in to the Real Vision Daily Briefing. For more content like this, head over to realvision.com and get unfiltered access to the very best, brightest, and biggest names in finance.

From the publisher

Ash Bennington is joined Ric Edelman, investor, bestselling author, and founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (DACFP), to discuss his latest book, The Truth About Crypto, and what investors need to know about the future of DeFi.
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