Starve the Ego Feed the Soul
Starve the Ego Feed the Soul
Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and the Future of Personal Wealth with David Wulschner
Visit Tangem.com and use code FEEDTHESOUL for a special discount on your cold wallet.
Cryptocurrency is transforming the future of finance, offering new ways to build wealth and diversify investments despite its volatility.
• David shares his crypto journey beginning in 2015 with Bitcoin mining
• Only 5% of the world's population currently owns cryptocurrency, showing massive growth potential
• Bitcoin is limited to 21 million coins ever, unlike fiat currency which can be printed endlessly
• Traditional investment strategies aren't working for millennials in today's economic climate
• Self-custody through hardware wallets like Tangem provides ultimate security and control
• Cold wallets protect your assets offline with physical verification requirements
• Diversification across crypto, stocks, real estate and liquid assets creates financial resilience
• Starting small with Bitcoin and Ethereum is recommended for beginners
• Research thoroughly before investing in altcoins or microcaps
• Patience is critical – give your crypto investments years, not months to mature
• Be vigilant about scammers requesting seed phrases or asking you to connect wallets
Visit Tangem.com and use code FEEDTHESOUL for a special discount on your cold wallet.
Warmly,
Nico Barraza
@FeedTheSoulNB
www.nicobarraza.com
This show is brought to you by Tangent Wallet. Curious about crypto but not sure where to start? Cryptocurrency is more than a trend. It's a powerful tool for building wealth and diversifying your investments for you and your family. Despite its volatility, crypto is shaping the future of finance, with major institutions and industries adopting blockchain technology every day, and with Tangent Wallet, managing your crypto is simple and secure. It's a hardware wallet the size of a credit card, offline tamper-proof, and no passwords to worry about your assets your control. Visit Tangemcom T-A-N-G-E-Mcom today and use code FEEDTHESOUL for a special discount. Start small, think big. Hey y'all, good morning, welcome back to the show. So I have a guest today that's going to talk about cryptocurrency, and I'm going to make this intro short and sweet. David is a representative of Tangim, and Tangim produces these cold wallets, and we'll get into what this all means if you're not familiar with crypto.
Speaker 1:I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2012, when I thought it was a complete scam, by a friend of mine that told me to invest in it. I ended up not investing in it because I was like this seems not real, invest in it. I ended up not investing in it because I was like this seems not real and fast forward to today. It's an incredibly huge market and a little bit different. So, whether you're a crypto skeptic or crypto enthusiast, you don't know anything about it. You're not an investor. You don't invest. Maybe you just have a 401k or retirement. This is a great episode to listen to, just for personal finance and personal wealth building, to set yourself up for your future, your family, anything you care about. As we know, the thing outside of health and time is really the ability to afford being healthy and having more free time to do the things you love with the people you love. So this is a great conversation with David and much appreciate to him coming all the way from Germany to have a conversation with me. A lot of great information here in so many different avenues of crypto and we do like a beginner's sort of intro to what it is, what it means. Yeah, really awesome. I've been waiting or wanting to get someone onto the show to talk about cryptocurrency and, yeah, david is the first person, so hopefully we'll have a couple more people too. And again, we're about to launch our 100th episode of the Star of the Ego Feed the Soul podcast. Could not be more excited. Very special guests lined up for that in a couple of weeks here, so please stay tuned.
Speaker 1:If you want to buy a Tangent wallet, a little cold wallet they're not very expensive at all. It's where you can hold all your cryptocurrency to make sure you're in complete custody of it and you're the sole owner. It doesn't have to sit on an exchange, which is basically like you can be your own bank with the crypto world Incentivizes. I have a little link. It's in the show notes. I believe it's just Feed the Soul, but it might be Feed the Soul 10 or something. You can check it out in the show notes. Order it. It's like 10 or 20 bucks. The show gets a little kickback, so you can help me out too and you won't be disappointed. Tandem is the project I use to invest in crypto as well too. So, yeah, check it out and make sure you do your research and look up anything else you want to learn.
Speaker 1:I think the one takeaway from this conversation, as David and I talk about, is to really empower yourself, educate yourself.
Speaker 1:Even if it's a little bit on YouTube or on podcasts, really spend the time to learn about personal finance, learn about crypto, learn about investing, learn about how markets work and just educate yourself in that way.
Speaker 1:It's just as important as knowing how to cook a meal, how to take care of family. You know, I think a lot of us didn't grow up with that education I certainly didn't and so you got to seek it, you got to put energy into it. It might sound dry, it might sound a little like boring at first, but you know it really will behoove you and improve your life to study that, just like you would study how to love and study relationships as well too. So, without further ado, david with Tangent Wallet. David, welcome to Starve the Ego, feed the Soul. It's so good to have you. I've been wanting to have someone on the show to talk about crypto, bitcoin, all the stuff surrounding that, for a while now, and thankfully I was connected with you through a product I use, tangent. So thank you so much for coming on the show all the way from Germany.
Speaker 2:Thank you, nico, thank you very much for having me and thank you very much that we can talk a little bit about this. I would say really lifetime opportunity to really dig our heads a little bit deeper into the crypto space, talk about self-custody and also a little bit, maybe, about Tangium and the most securest and safest way to store your assets, while you are the one who owns it and also controls it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So I was a little bit of a late bloomer to crypto and I have a funny parable story to tell you. So I have a really close friend who went to high school with me. He was also a college athlete and he sent me a message in 2012. So I think Bitcoin was maybe around $120 a coin back then right, $180. It was around that right. It was very cheap comparatively to today's standards. And he sent me a message and he's like hey, man, you should put a couple hundred bucks in this Bitcoin thing.
Speaker 1:I didn't know anything about it. I was 22 years old, just got a graduate from undergrad and of course we were in that financial crisis where the housing market was in a downturn Not from undergrad and of course, we were in that financial crisis where the housing market was in a downturn. Not a lot of millennials could get a job with an undergrad degree when they're graduating Kind of similar to what's going on today a little bit. And I'm like, yeah, this looks like a scam man. I had some financial background but I didn't know about crypto, I didn't know about blockchain, I didn't understand DeFi we can talk all about these things. I was like I put a little bit of money in the stock market. I want to have a 401k or a Roth IRA when I start working. I didn't even have a real job at the time. I just graduated and I was like I don't really have that much money. I can't do that, man Sorry, this sounds like a scam. He put $5,000 in it back then and he hasn't worked since. Well, he invests now, but he's 30-something years old and he really hasn't worked since Bitcoin shot up. Now that's a very particular use case, but I wanted to start the conversation with that because back then I was like a non-believer, a denier of the technology I didn't really understand and a way to hold value I didn't understand just like regular fiat currency, regular money, and I have so many questions around this to you because my user base or my listener base here they're not.
Speaker 1:They come on this show for a lot of different things, but financial literacy and building wealth and feeling stable, no matter what age you are. That allows us to do the things we love in life. It allows us to protect our families, allows us to grow, allows us to travel, have all these beautiful experiences and in this day and age, it's quite hard investing and doing things like you were doing in the 60s or 70s. Right, our entire world economy has changed. The political economy has changed. So the first question I guess I have for you, david, with the story I just told, is like what got you into crypto? What was your entry story? How long have you been in it, and did you have a little bit of a reluctancy to like I did? You probably didn't take as long, but maybe you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty interesting. So I mean the biggest topic. I mean I have had the chance to live in the United States for three and a half years, between 2021 and 2024. So I realized pretty soon that there is a knowledge gap between the US Americans and the Europeans. Do you by chance know how many Americans, just roughly, are invested in stocks? I can tell you between 45 and 50% of the Americans are invested in stocks. Do you know, by chance how many in Germany are invested in stocks? Less than 15%. So financial knowledge in Germany is not there. Nobody tells us how to build up wealth. Nobody tells us how to grow your personal income and maybe do something different than a retirement plan, like comparable with you for a 1k what you got in the states or some company driven things. So this is something very sad that I recognize and even with my kids. Uh, they're going to tell me that why I learned bullshit in school, like whatever, and they don't tell me something about paying taxes. Uh, building up wealth, investing in cryptos and stocks um, yada, yada, yada. So this is something that really impressed me when I came to the States and I said, okay, guys, we really need to change something here in Germany as well. So what brought me into crypto is really funny.
Speaker 2:Wife and I bought in 2013 our first own house and we put up a solar um yeah plant on the roof with 15.06 k kw peak and also with batteries in there, and that was most likely the very first plan we had. What in the surrounding area had batteries. You know, we can store energy. What was pretty new in those days in, I think, 2014, 2013. And a friend of me came in 2015 and said David, I got something that is consuming horribly much energy. It's called Bitcoin miners. I mean, by chance, are you interested in that? We're going to put that in your house, plug it into the socket and just mine a little bit Bitcoin with your power and we split half and half. I said, for sure. I mean, I heard about Bitcoin a couple of years ago. Can you explain to me what it is? He said you know, david, I don't know for sure, but either it's something for black market or it's something for the government, I don't know. I say, okay, it doesn't matter, let's go into it. So and I have had three big miners sitting up in my uh roof mining bitcoin for almost three months, and that was roughly at the price when bitcoin was at 216 250 roughly 250 dollars. And after three months the energy bill came and we pretty quick recognized that the power consumption was much higher than the solar plant is producing. And I ended up in, I think, 5 or 6k in power bill additionally. And I said, jürgen, I don't think this will ever work. This looks like a scam to me. Take the Bitcoin If you're going to take over the power bill. I'm perfectly fine with that.
Speaker 2:And that was my beginning of the crypto market and it never left. It never left me loose. You know, I just took a look to what was the hash rate, what is the pricing. Then I saw Bitcoin climbs up to 10,000. Then I saw 11,000. Then I saw the peak at 16,000. Then it corrects. And you know, I began investigating roughly a year after that a little bit deeper and understood, or started to understand, what happens there. And after that I began roughly in 2018, 2019, investing again in cryptos, started with altcoins. Xrp was rough. No, sorry, it was not XRP, it was Bitcoin Cash. It doesn't matter, no matter what. Litecoin. Litecoin was my first investment. So now I got it. And then after that I started investing in XRP and my altcoin journey just began and that was roughly my start into crypto and I really wish I took the additional steps earlier to understand the technology, to understand what they're doing, to understand what is possible and to understand what problem they're going to solve.
Speaker 2:I mean the biggest scam we got in history is the fiat system. They're printing out money from nowhere and they're pushing each other countries. I mean right now what happens is phenomenal around the globe with Europe, with central banks, with everything. What's driven by Donald Trump? I don't know, I don't get too many words for that, but it's amazing, and you brought up two things.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about fiat, but I want to talk about the energy consumption of crypto, because that's a huge part of this right, because people bring up hey to run this entire crypto market as it grows. It's an incredibly high tax, environmentally right. So we can touch on that too, because that's a really good point. I think it's good to be transparent about that, because there's these huge energy sinks with crypto and how can we mitigate that while transitioning to this? But let's table that.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the fiat problem. A lot of people don't understand just exactly how inflation really works. They just think, oh, sometimes the economy goes up, it goes down. But essentially, the problem with fiat is that these governing bodies can just dump more money of whatever the currency is into the economy, and that lowers the value of your dollar. So if you go to work and you're making 60 grand a year, but they dump a bunch of money, that 60 grand all of a sudden becomes 45 grand a year.
Speaker 1:Literally, that's what happens, and so it's not that goods are getting more expensive which they are a little bit it's actually that you're making less money. You're not making as much money as being sold to you and they're like oh, wages are going up and they're not. And so that's the whole problem with fiat currency, where crypto gets to skirt around that because, well, as of recently, it hasn't been really regulated or hasn't been used like that. But I would love for you to explain how crypto differentiates itself from and we can talk about different coins we could just focus on Bitcoin or crypto in general but how it differentiates itself from regular fiat currency and maybe how it's insulated from turning in to a fiat. You know what I mean, because could, hypothetically, a government just take over a coin and start to change the rules of it, or is that something that's protected?
Speaker 2:That's a pretty good comparison what you're going to bring up there. So, first of all, I think we cannot throw all cryptocurrencies in one bucket and say they're all the same. So I really appreciate it. We can just say, okay, let's talk about Bitcoin maybe in that comparison and compare it really against fiat. So the biggest topic and the biggest benefit about Bitcoin is it is limited. There are only 21 million. I mean, it's not correct, it's a little bit less than 21 million, but let's say 21 million that can ever exist on the world. That is all that ever could get mined, can get stored in different wallets, no matter if it's a cold wallet or a hot wallet or an exchange or anywhere else. And this is, for example, the biggest USP for Bitcoin by its own. I would say In comparison to that, no matter if it's a euro, if it's the yuan, if it's the US dollar, if it's the pesos, those can get printed by the governments by their own and the persons or the entities that are going to give value to that fiat currency is not request, upon demand, it is the government by its own. So the government tells the US dollar got this value, and this is horrible In comparison to that the value of Bitcoin get defined by how many people want to buy it and how many people want to sell it.
Speaker 2:And right now we're here really at the USP point. At another USP point, it is really that way that the majority of the investors right now understand that Bitcoin is limited, that you can only buy so many right now. The amount that gets stored on official seller pages like Kraken, binance, robinhood, etc. The amounts they drop down Right now we have the lowest amount on Bitcoin on the exchanges ever, and whoever just paid a little bit of attention in school I mean for sure, yes, in Germany also had a little bit about market economies. So if you have a high demand and low offers, what it means for sure price rises up, and this is what we see right now. And with everything that happens in the last, I would say, half a year, three quarter of a year, a lot of new investors understood that fiat is dirty and Bitcoin is clean.
Speaker 2:Sorry to make that picture writing right now, but this is really the way, how it is, and I'm not somebody who's against everything, you know I'm. I'm perfectly fine with the system how it is right now, as long as my kids and their kids and the kids of my kids. Kids can have a good life, um, but how it is right now, it won't work forever. I really gonna see some kind like a big crisis in the next years, a great reset. I mean, there are many names out there for that. But the way how the economy works right now, with all the O-wings, everything that's out there on the market, that is nothing that can exist for, I don't know, 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense and I appreciate you differentiating crypto because there is different volatilities within the crypto market. When you look at Bitcoin versus stable coin, bitcoin is a more stable crypto. Digital gold is what people call it, and I think when someone explained it to me like this, it's when it clicked in my mind. Even outside of blockchain, how blockchain works is very. There's a ton of computer science in there that sometimes flies over people's heads, but as far as crypto and Bitcoin, it's just a way to hold value, and human beings give things value, and so people for a long time were like oh, the dollar, it's backed by gold and it's not. The dollar is just the US government's way of assigning value, and because most Americans and people in the world operate under that system, they too assign value to it. And because most Americans and people in the world operate under that system, they too assign value to it. And that's where our market's based off of the dollar or something similar to it, a different currency.
Speaker 1:And Bitcoin is just a way to assign value.
Speaker 1:It's a way to hold value in a more secure way that can be transferred in an instance that can only be accessed by you, which will get into storage, hot and cold wallets and how those differ, and that sort of concept is different for people, because most people are used to going to a bank and that's the middleman.
Speaker 1:That's sort of crypto sort of. I mean, we have exchanges to buy it, but it sort of goes around the banking system a little bit, which is also very curious to me, because I am curious how banks will play a role in it now, as you see these larger funds having Bitcoin ETFs right, and then now will banks get into Bitcoin holding right, and because they obviously are these huge entities that want to be involved in the power structure. And so I'm curious on what you think about where we're going in terms of, I guess, a Bitcoin-based economy, because from what I've read and I don't know the statistics, I'm just hearing this from people on other podcasts is like 5% of the world's population owns crypto or Bitcoin or something which it might be around that, but that's an incredibly low number for being 2025.
Speaker 2:Interestingly, this number just dropped by 2%, no, just raised up by 2% between 2022 and 2025. Right now, we were in 2022. When I started my, I would say, crypto YouTube journey, we were at roughly 3%. That was just the consumption, what people said. So I think this question is pretty interesting. What is the role that banks will play in the next? I would say maybe decades, two or three, because the main idea of Satoshi Nakamoto, when he wrote the Bitcoin light paper in 2008 and the first block were mined in January 2009, was be your own bank, you know, with all the beauty and all the horrible things that comes with it. And I think, in my opinion, banks cannot avoid banks. They want to have the control. The government needs to have the control about the banks and the banks will have the control about us.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you want to buy a house right now, you need a bank there is no way not to buy a house without a bank or maybe something you want to borrow money for, no matter what. So the beauty idea about be your own bank, for sure up to a certain point, but not without them. Specifically with yesterday, with the presidential Donald Trump, democratic access to alternative asset for 401k investors. I think this is also pretty interesting that he advised his expert group to check the next 180 days in what alternative investment classes they can put funds in from the retirement funds. And this is also just another milestone that shows, um, how interesting the crypto industry becomes for I would say, pretty old school investment groups. I mean no company, no matter if it's van eyck, uh or anybody else, can, I would say, invest the retirement money for their, um, for their products, into something very volatile.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean right now they can really only invest in in few items, and donald wanted to check can they do it in crypto? Can they do it in gold and silver and stocks and also houses? You know, I mean this is real estate. This is interesting, this is really interesting and I think, with all the changes on the market out there, with the acceptance and the regulations, for sure, I mean you started a little bit with that regulation topic. This might become, I think the naming of Bitcoin is gold. I really don't like that, but I think it becomes true. But it's better to handle, it's better to transport, it's better to send, it's better to sell than physical gold.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Yeah, it's an interesting point about the 401k thing because I read up about that and it'll still be probably up to the companies that support the 401k rate. They still have to allow it because they're the ones supporting it. But, for instance, I have an RIA Roth rollover IRA for my last corporate job and I changed a bunch of my investments in this past year. I went from your traditional 80-20 stocks bonds to pretty much 100% more volatile, I would say, traditional assets. And it's because I'm 35 years old and I looked at the system.
Speaker 1:I'm like if I don't play ball like the future, I'm going to be stuck in the past and I'm not going to be making as much, and you understand that. But a lot of people they're so stuck because their parents' generation boomers or older. They're like you have to play it safe, you have to invest like this. I'm like that's not going to work for us guys. We're losing money if we invest like that. And so now I'm in a lot of biotech companies, I'm in MicroStrategy, I'm in the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF, which is interesting because in Fidelity you can do that. But that's a separate bucket. You put it is a retirement account, but I have to put into that versus the retirement account.
Speaker 1:Through my work, I have 11 stocks that I can invest in. It's much more limited, which is interesting to me because people that are listening to this I wanted to bring up retirement. It's like in your mind for someone that's 20, 30 years old in the workforce, should they even be putting into a retirement fully or should they look at crypto? As I remember, I listened to Natalie Burnell's podcast, coin Stories, which I love and she had I can't remember the gentleman she had on a couple episodes ago but he was basically saying and he was an old school investor and he was like I think you should put 60% of your total retirement into crypto right now, mainly Bitcoin and that's a bold statement, that's a huge statement. And I'm not saying go do that, but I'm saying there are people that are old school minded that are now shifting their perspective just based on how the fiat market's working.
Speaker 2:It's pretty interesting. So let me compare that, or maybe rephrase it a little bit, with my personal situation right now. My wife and I, together with our four kids, we probably own, I would say, what is it? 1.5 to 2.5 million, that is what we owe. Or what personal hours is right now In money, in stocks, in crypto, in retirement, retirement accounts, in housing, um, and we have a pretty interesting let's. Let's talk about a rough number of two million. We have a pretty interesting splitting um, housing is roughly one-fourth of that, so a quarter is solid stones. Yeah, so just for everybody who's not familiar with the building style, in Germany, we build everything with bricks.
Speaker 2:We don't like dry walls. We don't like Our houses last at least for 150 years. Totally stupid, but it is where it is. This is how we grew up. Just built forever.
Speaker 2:Then I would say another fourth is roughly in liquidity, just really money, what we have, what we can use, and the remaining half of that, I would say one third, is in stocks and the rest is all in crypto. And this is totally stupid because what we really own in crypto is most likely altcoins, and I'm not talking about the top 50 or the top 100. I probably have three or four coins in the top 100. The majority of my crypto portfolio, what's a huge amount, is in low caps, in nano caps, in small caps, and I mean they're really rockets. They can rocket or they can explode at the bottom or lower at the bottom.
Speaker 2:We also have traditional retirement accounts and programs running what I would say probably also generates good amount of money when we retire. We also have housings, what we rent out with a very good income, but make sure that we have a continuous cash flow. But we split it. We have, I would say, really one quarter of that, what we own, solidly reliable, proved, according to the current standards of the boomer generation, that let's use that wording um and the remaining stuff is, I would say, really wide open. And this is just the way how we work, or how we started in our financial um situation and really think that this might become the best outcome, you know. So just something solid where you can build a foundation, then the remaining stuff sitting on different pillars, so if one pillar maybe breaks down, collapses, explodes, your house is not breaking down, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you basically just explained diversification right In that process and, first of all, congratulations. That sounds like an awesome personal portfolio for you and your family. For people that are not in Bitcoin, I have a lot of friends that are around my age mid-30s, early 30s, late 20s right that are. They even let their money sit in a savings account, right, and I'm not talking just like their emergency fund of three to six months, that every personal finance person says that they have a lot of money just sitting around.
Speaker 1:And, let's say, even if they're in the stock market, for instance, what is your go-to advice on how to get involved in crypto, whether it's dollar cost averaging? For me, I'm just like you could put 10 bucks a week into certain coins and just start there, or five bucks a week, even. What do you tell people that are maybe more conservative and more reserved on dipping their toe in so that they don't miss the bus and they can see? And how long do you recommend that they just put into it before they actually see what crypto does? Because I think a lot of people go in it's so volatile and they're like it'll tank and they'll be like, oh my God, and they'll take their money out, even if it's a hundred bucks, because they it just got halved in, like you know, three months.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, I think it's pretty important to understand that what we're saying here and I think this is something general for you this is not a financial advice. It's just our ideas and we want to help people really getting their foot into the door and start thinking about things you know. So I would highly recommend accept the time. So when you take a look right now to Bitcoin, we're at $116,758 at the moment. We're recording that. If you're going to hear that it could be a couple of thousand dollars less, it could be that we're right now at $140,000. If you're going to look at that price and hear Nico's and my starting point, with 150 and 200, you would say it's way too late, it's much too high. I couldn't afford that no bullshit.
Speaker 2:It's not too late. Just keep into consideration that bitcoin price will be from here on, probably in the next four to eight years, at an amount of a quarter of a million, half a million, very optimistically probably at one million. If you can believe it or not, this is something that the majority of the analysts say. We can see prices between 2028 and 2032, roughly in the million area, maybe earlier, because what happened in the last again half year, three quarter of a year is more than what happened in the last 10 years and that is absolutely amazing. So my general advice would be just take the time, dig into the technology. If you just invested 50 hours into learning about Bitcoin, you just scratched on the surface just a little bit with your fingernail.
Speaker 2:If you invested 500 hours. You just poked your finger a little bit deeper into the mud. That's all it is. You will not understand the whole technology, what it's for, what you can do with it, what changes everything on the market and what changes the economy if you have invested 500 hours in it. It's fun, it is really fun. Once you've done that, you just need to invest another good amount of time to find a good exchange where you can send your dirty fiat money, swap it into Bitcoin and then do the most important part, what you can do.
Speaker 2:Don't leave it on an exchange. You just have to remove it from the exchange and put it on your own crypto wallet, no matter if it's a hot wallet or a cold wallet. Nico and I we highly recommend Tangent. Nico also got his own discount code, so if you want to invest into a Tangent wallet, nico will probably going to link that to the bottom below or somewhere else in the podcast. You can also get a 10% discount for the Tandem Wallet, and this is really something that you have to understand.
Speaker 2:If you're going to leave your cryptos no matter if it's Bitcoin, ethereum, xrp, cardano, polkadot, whatever leave it on the exchange. You are not the owner. Theoretically it's yours, yours. But the exchange, or maybe the government, can say no, david, we don't want you to have crypto. We're gonna pull the crypto off of that exchange because you don't have the keys. You don't get the rights to um store that correctly. But if you have pulled it down from the exchange onto your hardware wallet what's in our recommendation tangle wallet you are definitely good to go have the best opportunity in your lifetime to make self-custody in the way it, how it should be. So what was pretty interesting to me um in in that whole journey is really the complexity, and I can tell you when you're going to start investigating into what crypto exchange you're going to need to use, what also allows you to transfer your funds. I mean, you're going to make a couple of mistakes. That is the way you know. Before you're going to run, you have to crawl, then you have to walk and then you can run, and that's the way also in crypto industry. So take the time, investigate into where you want to invest, how many you you want to invest, and this is also the next topic If you're going to start with investing.
Speaker 2:I'm personally not the biggest fan of $10 each week, but that's how I work. I mean, when it comes to money, I'm emotionally complete dead. It doesn't matter to me if my altcoin is gone to zero or if it's done a 10x, I don't know. I'm really emotional dad when it comes to that. So I got my plans how I cash out, how many profit I'm going to take when I have just a coin. Who bumped up 500% and that's good. But you really need to understand how that game works and what is your expectation. But again, take your time, investigate into the technology, make mistakes and start with investing a little bit. And if you're infected by the virus at a certain point, it won't let you lose. It will really grow into your heart, grow into your mind and after a certain point, you cannot leave your hands out of that. That's definitely the point.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like walking through a door, right, david? Once you go through the door, you can't go back, you can't unsee it, because then you see how regular money is manipulated by powers outside of our control. Right, it's just normal human beings. You're like, wait a minute, what's the difference? I should own my own type of currency versus a currency that someone else can manipulate and change the value almost instantly.
Speaker 1:But I want to go back to the exchange thing and how you get in, because you brought up an exchange like Coinbase, kraken, these things, and then you have the hot and cold wallets, and I want you to explain a little bit more how that works to my listeners, because the only way to buy crypto it's different these days than it was in 2012 or before. Then it's easier to buy you have to make an account on these things called exchanges, which sort of operate a little bit like banks in a way, and then you have a hot and cold wallet, and so can you explain the differences of these things and maybe the different use cases? Right, because cold wallet, long-term holding versus what? If you want to trade quite frequently, right, and you have to pay exchange fees, is a cold wallet recommended for that. Can you explain all these different properties?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So there are most likely four major ways how you can store your Bitcoin or the majority of the crypto assets. First way you can keep it on your crypto exchange. This is most likely like a bank, in the majority of the cases, 100% unregulated, completely shady, and I really need to say that. No matter if we talk about Binance or maybe just a chip Japanese exchange, it doesn't matter. The majority of those are really unregulated and can explode every other minute. That's the case. We saw that in 2023 or 2024 with FTX I think 2023 or was it 2022? It doesn't matter With FTX, and this really left a big impact on the market.
Speaker 2:The second way where you can store your crypto assets is a hot wallet or a cold software wallet. This is most likely a computer program or an app, what you have on your smartphone or on your computer, what stores the keys to your blockchain vault. Let me call it that way. The blockchain is the, I would say, the most open cashier's book, what you can see, because you see how, what wallet address send it, how many bitcoins to what other wallet address, and this is pretty interesting. You don't have names behind there. I mean, if I would know Nico's Bitcoin address, I can say, okay, this is Nico's Bitcoin address and I can see that Nico sent maybe I don't know half a Bitcoin to another wallet address, but I don't know who's the other wallet address, so it is quite anonymous. But if you can compare names to the wallet address, it's not anymore. So and this is this is just just to give you a small overview. Um, the problem with with hot wallets or software wallets is it's a program. If you have access to the computer or the smartphone or you can hack it, then you're definitely going to lose everything.
Speaker 2:So there there's the third way, what I highly prefer, what I use a lot of times, no matter what life condition. It called cold wallets or hardware wallets. A hardware wallet is most likely also part of that is a computer program but combined with a physical device. This physical device you have to have with you. You need to log into the physical device at some models, um see the complete um wallet address where you want to send some bitcoins etc. And then you physical have to push some knobs or just take a card, hold it to your smartphone and sign with something you have that you are the owner of that wallet and you want to send the cryptos from your wallet to another. So this is most likely really the most secure way, because there is no way you can hack a physical wallet, no matter if you have it in person or you're going to have access to the device. So you really have to have the physical device by yourself to sign the transaction.
Speaker 2:And the fourth way is a paper wallet. That's a little bit more complicated. We don't want to dive too much into that, but this is also a possibility. But I don't use that at all, and the main reason why I'm going to highly recommend getting your hands on a cold wallet is really, I mean, what happens today with the regulations, with the upcoming things that are needed to put acceptancy and also reliability into exchanges. This is really horrible.
Speaker 2:With the CARF, what will also go live in 2028 for the United States of America? What will also go live in 2028 for the United States of America? The government and also combined states what are in the CARV system, and I think there are roughly then 68 or 70 different countries. They're going to exchange information about crypto investors who is the investor, what wallet address belongs to them, what are their ownings, where do they live? Phone number, email address and complete postal address, and this is like making you completely out of glass I don't get a better word for that, but I guess you know what I mean. And with that, I don't want to hold any cryptos on the exchanges, um, when this system goes live. So I will definitely going to have to have everything on a cold wallet.
Speaker 2:And again, the tangent is really one of the most secure, most easiest to set up wallets. We have a bunch of videos we can, we can, display to the users, um, to help them settle that up. So, when it comes to trading, when I really say, okay, I'm maybe a daily trader, I like leverage trading, futures trading, then most likely, yes, you're going to have to have your cryptos on the exchange, but only the amount you use for trading. If you have, maybe like me, a seven or a six digit big crypto portfolio, I have to split it up to multiple hardware wallets. So whenever I reach the investment amount of $15,000, I'm going to start a new crypto hardware wallet. Interesting For sure.
Speaker 2:Right now, I got a little bit more than 12 different wallets. My kids, each of them, have their own crypto hardware wallet where they have their funds on there. So they got a typical bank account, but they don't get a saving account anymore because we've invested all in crypto. And I got the agreement with them whenever they get some money from their grandparents, I kind of double it. And when they want to take it out and maybe the price is lower than they took it in'm going to give them the difference between that, you know. So this is our agreement. When I say, hey, just just help them understand, get your money into crypto and not into on the bank account. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So, david, I want to ask a question what you just said. So why is your limit 15k per wallet right? Like, how did you come up with that? And is that that just to diversify your risk, just in case one gets lost, or something like that on these hardware wallets? Why 15,000?
Speaker 2:This is my inner amount, what I can accept when I lose it.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense. So you had a conversation with yourself and like, look, if I have six figures, seven figures in here, if I break it out into 15 cards, 12 cards, whatever, cold wallets. That's the thing, and I'm guessing every person has a cold wallet. For people that don't realize this, it's like your own bank, like you said, and people are storing this thing. For instance, tangent, you can have a ring or you can have this little NFC card that you have to tap on your phone before you make a trade or a transaction.
Speaker 1:So someone would actually have to have access to your Tangerine account and access to this physical thing. And that's the cold wallet process, right? That's why it's so hard to hack, because they'd have to have a lot of things go right for them to have that. And then you have your set of your 12 or 8 keys right, which allows you to access it. Let's say, as a question, I was going to ask what if the company goes under? What if a company disappears or vanishes? Right? People are like okay, I have this cold wallet, this company doesn't exist anymore, and that's where the sort of the key phrases come in, right? Can you explain how that works?
Speaker 2:For sure. So there's something very unique, what I haven't told so far. In general, all crypto hardware wallets or let me say all crypto wallets exist on a standard that was created very wisely in the early days, and they're called the BIP39 standard. This is where you can grab your wallet and relocate it on different devices. So the BIP39 standard is the consumption of 2048 words. Is the consumption of 2,048 words what you bring into a logical direction of 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 words I'm sorry, and you couldn't mix up that words, you know. So it needs to get generated by a device, because this words the first words, the first 11 words plus the last one, the last one is the proof that all previous ones are correct called the seed phrase, and the Tandem is the first wallet ever and there are no other ones out there on the market right now first hardware wallet that says you know what?
Speaker 2:This seed phrase is one of the biggest attacking and scamming points where people can lose their funds. Not because the seed phrase can get figured out by just brute forcing. It's impossible, it's not possible. So Tantrum said okay, let's create a wallet where you don't need seed phrases, where your seed phrases are just guys. We know for sure why you did that without seed phrases, but we were told and we were trained since 2009,. We need seed phrases.
Speaker 2:So Tangent said okay, we make this version. This is our latest and greatest version, where you can set up your hardware wallet with seed phrases, so with the 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words, or without. So here's the biggest point. If you're going to write down the seed phrases on a sheet of paper or let me say on a sheet of paper, or engrave it into metal plates, shims or whatever, and then just hide it into a vault, perfect, the best way. If you're going to write down the seed phrases on your computer, put it into a Word file or make a photo with your smartphone or I don't know just store it into a PDF somewhere else.
Speaker 2:It is super, super easy for a hacker to socially engineer it, to figure it out, yada, yada, yada. And this is something what you really need to be very careful with to make sure that whenever you store your seed phrases, you store it in the right way. I don't have any photos, any digital informations of my wallets, of my seed phrases stored somewhere. I only have it physical and I also have have it charted. So half of the seed phrase is at one spot, the other half at another spot.
Speaker 1:So this is also, you know, I'm I mean my, my aluminum hat is very big sometimes, you know yeah so no, but that that's exactly how I do, and I don't have nearly as much capital as you do in crypto, but I hope to at some and once I started to figure this out and really understand the safety and security behind it because at first I was like, well, do I really need a seed phrase? And then I think that the doomsday thing where it's like okay, what if the company goes under, what if the card stops working I mean things break and so I'm like I do believe in the backup of seed phrases, of having them, because I would hate to have X amount of Bitcoin in a wallet and not have access to it, and so storing it on some sort of physical notation system, but then off of technology, the thing you're speaking to is especially with AI and the ability for hackers to scan for seed phrase type documents if they get access. It's so easy to see that 12 words, 24 words or 18 words this is a seed phrase. Right, there's ways to sort of encrypt your own seed phrase with different methodologies, but again, that's like an extra step. You should just probably hold it physically, hide it somewhere probably not where you live, depending on how much money you have and that's probably the best way to keep hold of it.
Speaker 1:I know some people their heads are probably about to explode. What are these guys talking about right now? But really it's not that complicated. It's just really not that complicated. I really appreciate you saying just go to YouTube, educate yourself just a little bit, Even if it's like not everyone is nerdy like us about this stuff. Right, I think there's a certain mind about it. But even if you just watch a video that's like 10 minute basics on what crypto is, what Bitcoin is, it's really good. You go to David's channel, go to someone's channel, just to educate yourself a little bit, just like you would on taxes, just like you would on insurance. Right, Repairing a car, doing something, repairing the dishwasher Empower yourself.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter, just start getting that journey. And I really want to dive into the other question that you have, because I forgot it just a little bit. The main question that you're going to need to ask yourself if you select a hardware wallet what is if this company goes out of business? The really beautiful thing about Tandem is that the complete code is open source, so we're not hiding anything, we're not sneak peeking anything. Tandem just have had two individual firmware audits from Switzerland tech companies that we proved no backdoors in the code, everything's reliable, everything's good. And again, our code get uploaded for every better task and to github so the community can investigate in it.
Speaker 2:And luckily we had a tremendous great community that checks the work of our developers, our front end-end developers, our back-end developers, our programmers every time. And I mean this is amazing. The good thing is this card, this hardware wallet and I'm really talking only about Tangent because other crypto hardware wallets, the suppliers work differently this is just the key to your vault on the blockchain. I know I can explain it much more different and much more harder, but we want to keep it on a high level. So, and If the company goes out of business, it doesn't matter, because everything you're going to do, everything you're going to need, is on your phone. It's your software that runs individually from the company. There are no servers that the company operates. Yes, there's one small server that checks the batch number during first setup of the wallet, if that's really a tangent batch or not, but that's all it's going to do, not more, and everything runs on your smartphone, completely encrypted, that nobody else can figure it out and just with the proof of your card.
Speaker 2:So whenever you want to sign a transaction say you want to send Nico, want to send me half a Bitcoin you're going to have to physically tap the card to his phone to prove that he's the owner of the phone, nothing more. So long story short. If Tangent goes out of business, there is no change for you. It still works and this is great, and this is something that I would say. The majority of the other hardware wallet providers have an issue. Because they operate servers, they're going to save information about the customers. What we don don't do. We don't have any combination between shipping and producing, so we don't know. I mean, right now, they know that this number is at David yeah, so they know that because I showed it here in the camera but nobody can figure out who becomes what wallet, who's the owner of what wallet, and we don't track anything. We couldn't do it and we don't want to do it, because privacy for our customers is the highest good we have and we really protect it very hardly.
Speaker 1:Right, that makes sense. I appreciate you bringing that up. I want to bring up that there was that issue with Tangent. That happened right with sort of that, when you went to their app and you requested.
Speaker 1:It was some sort of like and you requested it was some sort of like something was going on right and it had that stuff in the Reddit. Reddit sort of blew up and then. But Tangent responded to it. Right, I read their responses. Would you mind talking about that a little bit, because I think that helps quell some people's nerves about what happened within that.
Speaker 2:I can tell you. So I came to Tangent in 2023, very early in the beginning, when a really good guy came to me and said hey, david, we love your channel. Would you mind talking about Tangent? I said, yes, for sure. I don't want to have any money, just send me some Tangent cards. I want to check it out and test it out. And since end of 2023, I'm the very first official brand ambassador. So I have sitting in I don't know hundreds of different AMAs, together with Paul Baron Newton, with all other really big guys in the crypto market, and I never have had so many sleepless nights since I had in the end of 2024.
Speaker 2:When this came up at Tangent, I can tell you there are a lot of people that were absolutely shocked that this issue happened. So, very shortly, to explain what happened when you set up your wallet with seed phrases, the seed phrases were stored on the cart, not anywhere else, but to put them on the card, you're going to have to enter them into your phone. Tangent had a very let me say, very early code line where what they use for development steps, where they said when you create your wallet with a seed phrase, then you save it in a temp file to your smartphone and you can send that temp file only to the support email address. Unfortunately, the need to say it as it is, one of the developers left that code in there, or he copied it accidentally in there. Left that code in there or he copied it accidentally in there and what happened is when you have set up your hardware wallet in a certain amount of days and I think it was a time period of seven days with seed phrases and you have sent in that timeframe support email request with a temp file to the Tangent team, then your seed phrase was sent by an email to Tangent Worst story ever send a seed phrase in an email to someone else. I mean, this is horrible, honestly talking, and I couldn't complain about that and that shocked a lot of people. But the good thing is we have identified 100% how many cases we had, and it were less than 300, I think 298 in that we had completely documented all the wallet addresses that were affected. We are checking them regularly on the scan possibilities, what we got, so you can go to EtherScan or BitcoinScan and see what happens there. You can go to Etherscan or BitcoinScan and see what happens there.
Speaker 2:And we also wrote to every user personally who just sent us that hey, you have done that, please go that route. Download the new patch, please update your wallet, please maybe reset your wallet. And that was very important for us because we saw that issue. It was our issue, we created it and we have to fix it.
Speaker 2:Other companies I mean I can talk about some other guys you know, sitting in France, they're producing the most popular hardware wallet on the market, but it doesn't matter. You know they also made mistakes and I can tell you every hardware wallet supplier have that possibility. A lot of have that also active too. And here comes the point Give government-driven organizations your private keys that they can freeze your funds period, and that's the case. But I can tell you we had created a lot of extra quality control steps with double-checking developers, checking developers, with a quality insurance process. We lined up and we also increased our beta testing group with more users, with more skilled users, to help never happen things like that again and again. That was for me personally, because I'm the face in Germany for Tandem. Honestly, that was, that was. There were two very horrible nights honestly so.
Speaker 1:Did they recommend to those less than 300 people? Is there any way to reset their seed phrases connected to the wallet? They can do that right, and then they're basically starting from ground zero, Correct?
Speaker 2:So what they're going to have to do have to do that in those days they're going to need to send their funds to another wallet, then reset the Tandrum wallet and set it up new. With that, everything's wiped out. And here's the beauty. You know how that came up Because a user checked the code. You couldn't do that on a closed source hardware wallet. I would say 70% of the hardware wallets are out there on the market. You would never figure that out.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you saying that, because, basically, tangent has created sort of a blockchain cold wallet system where, like, everyone can check what's going on with the storage system itself, right? Which sort of self-governs, which is why I appreciate that about them. They're very transparent, and I had got into it after this had happened, so I avoided that. And then, of course, the people that didn't create seed phrases while they started their wallet weren't even affected, which was an interesting phenomenon too.
Speaker 2:And this is funny because we, as Tangent, highly recommend everybody no matter if you got $1 in Bitcoin on your wallet or you've got 10 million in Bitcoin on your wallet we highly recommend don't create seed phrases, because these are the topics where you can get social engineered. I mean, even for me, I have sharded my 24 words plus the passphrase. What is an additional layer, what we also have as an option. I have sharded that into two spots. Even if those two spots somebody can combine together, then they can wipe out my complete wallet. What is horrible? Yeah, so even tantrums. Hey, please, don't create seed phrases. But for those users who want it, you can do it, and this is something that you really need to understand, you need to accept.
Speaker 2:If you want to have seed phrases, there is a risk. For sure, it shouldn't get driven by the company by its own, and again, I feel so sorry for our guys and for every user, and I can totally understand why people say, hey, I didn't trust it. And this is also something that my colleagues don't like to hear, and I also get kicked into my butt if, when I say that. But but I think the important topic about hardware wallets is find a wallet you like, get your hands on it and feel safe with it. It doesn't it. There is no way to have a hardware, what you don't trust. It's's like with your physical wallet. If you, if you have a rigid wallet and you don't like it I mean you don't like to use it Then you go back to your leather wallet. Yeah, or maybe I don't know whatever, or maybe a clip or whatever. You have to have a wallet you trust, you rely on and you like so, because there is a lot of money on there at a certain point.
Speaker 1:a lot of money on there at a certain point. Yeah, no, absolutely, that's exactly right. So I guess, for people that are still curious about how they move money from an exchange to a cold wallet, I'd like for you to break down, because you said, okay, you keep a certain amount of crypto on an exchange for stuff you're going to trade, right, the rest of it's in a cold wallet, like your Tandrum, and in your mind there's these exchange fees. Right that when you transfer over, how do you know when to transfer over money from an exchange to a cold wallet? What is your theory and principle that allows you to negate whatever fees you're going to pay? Because when it goes in there, you have to pay a conversion fee, right, correct? Or a transfer fee, excuse me. And then, do you ever trade within Tangent, or are you always transferring out of your cold wallet into an exchange before you trade?
Speaker 2:So let me split that up into two points. No-transcript it into my crypto wallet. I mean, they got five assets yeah, bitcoin, ethereum, xrp and two really bumpy rockets. I mean they're probably gonna to explode at some point, but anyway, and when they gave me that money and I put 50 bucks in Bitcoin or I doubled it 100 bucks I'm going to send that 100 bucks right away to their wallet, because for me, internally, $100 is something that's okay if I'm going to pay three or four or five dollars in fees to send it over to the wallet. But this is my personal thing. There are other people out there on the market that say, hey, yeah, no hundred dollars, that's nuts for me. I'm gonna do that with with a zero more after that with thousand dollars. Some people say fifty dollars, is that? So this is all your personal security level, you know. Um, I would highly recommend sending everything right away from the exchange to your wallet. But, again, needs to make sense. If you're going to buy for ten dollars bitcoin, it doesn't make sense to send it over and you're going to pay five dollars fee. That that doesn't make any sense. Um, when it comes to to my personal um crypto portfolio, when I'm going to buy maybe a low cap or something else. I got the strategy that I'm going to probably invest roughly between one to maximum 3% of my whole portfolio into nano caps, into small caps, into really projects that are barefoot or high quality shoe. You know, I call it that way, you know, so I hope you get that phrase. I kind of put everything above $500 investment up to my hardware wallet. So this is what I got to do.
Speaker 2:Tangent also has a unique feature that's called Tangent Express, what allows you to directly sell your cryptos into stable coins, so coins that are backed by a fiat currency like USDT or USDC. You can directly swap Bitcoin, xrp, ethereum, no matter what into one of those two stable coins on Tangent and also oodles and doodles of other cryptocurrencies. So I'm going to use it also very frequently when I'm honestly too lazy to send the stuff to the exchange, accept the fees to send it over there, accept the fee from the exchange and then send it back in the stable coin to my wallet to store it safely. This is quality of life and this is also reducing fees. At some points it makes sense. At some points it doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:But what's the biggest topic on doing that use Tangent Express directly is not having the hesitation of maybe making a mistake by sending cryptos, because here comes the pain of self-custody. There is not only that one address or that one network you need to take care about. There are different coins out there on the market with different networks, with different addresses. So what could happen? Let's say you have a stable coin USDT you have it on your Tangent wallet and you have that stable coin on the Ethereum network, on an ERC20 token, and you want to send it to an exchange because you want to buy there a really bumpy meme coin, what's not available on Tangent Express, and you're going to go to your exchange, select your receiving address and you maybe select a Tron address what is not the same network.
Speaker 2:What will happen? You're gonna send from your tangent ethereum address to a tron address, and this is like sending a letter in german to nico in the united states. He will receive it, but he could not read it, he could not identify what I want from him and he threw it into his trash can. And this is exactly what will happen then with your cryptos it gets thrown in the trash can and it gets lost in the limbo, and that's the big problem. I mean for sure, you can probably restore it with a little bit of energy and with also a little bit of fees, but this is by the goodwill of the exchanges. There are also different ways to restore that. If you have done it on your own wallet.
Speaker 2:Restore that. But this is horrible and this is something that I totally avoid. With using Tangent Express, so I can directly swap on Tangent what's amazing, swap on tangent. What's amazing?
Speaker 1:and we also offer in the next I would say hopefully months, multiple months um more options to also cash out on tangents so you can just swap your crypto currencies into fiat wow, yeah, yeah, that's the biggest question, right, it's like how do you change crypto into fiat currency when you actually need I don't even want to use the term real money, but when you need the fiat currency to buy things in the real world, because you can't buy things with crypto yet. Right, in most places, I would say right, and I think that's obviously evolving and changing and I'm sure that's going to bring regulation and other things with it. But that's sort of more esoteric as of now. It's not reality. But yeah, that's the one thing with Tangent. It's, but yeah, that's the one thing with Tangent. It's like how do you?
Speaker 1:Most people use exchanges when they want to deposit back into their bank account so that way they can go spend actual fiat currency, and so you're saying that you guys are coming out with something which is definitely intriguing. So I think that's an interesting way to look at it. As soon as you basically buy crypto, you're transferring it to your cold wallet, unless it's some super volatile nano cap, which, basically, for people that don't know these terms, that's essentially like a startup in crypto. Right, it could rocket, it could crash. It's not like one of the big three, a big four that David was talking about. The question I have for you, david, is can you share some of your personal thought processes on how you're looking at those super volatile cryptos? How do you go about selecting them? I know you're really into this, so you probably research it and read a lot, but there are so many cryptocurrencies now, right. How do you go about picking those ones that are like your moonshots?
Speaker 2:That's pretty interesting. So, first of all, I do not have the dream that every cent I put into these rockets let's call it that way, or that bumpy frogs or whatever. I mean there are multiple ways to call it, to name it I don't expect that I get the money of all that back. So I have my third rule, my one third rule For every $1,000 I invest into 10 different cryptocurrencies or 10 different microcaps, I expect to lose one third. I expect to have one third, probably half value of that when I cash it out and I expect that one. That when I cash it out, and I expect that, the last third of that, probably there are the chances of maybe 10x, maybe 20x, maybe 50x, Maybe one of these 10 is a 100x gainer, probably. But again, for me, from $10,000 I invest, $3,300 are just blown away. That is how I could go to that investment at first.
Speaker 2:Before we're going to start about how to investigate in this, there are multiple ways. You can go in very, very, very, very, very early into seed funding rounds. Try to take a look to the team. Are they doxed, are they visible? Do they bring experience? Do they show up in stages? You can take a look. What is the idea of the project? If they're going to launch a new meme coin, I don't give a shit about it really honestly.
Speaker 2:I don't like meme coins.
Speaker 2:This is nothing substantial for me. You can make a lot of money with that, but, honestly, if the retail investor hears about a meme coin, it's already too late. I can tell you stories about that. It's horrible, anyway.
Speaker 2:So what is the idea behind that? That is something that counts for me. Then how is the white paper written? Do they have everything lined up? What is the token allocation? What is the gap between angel investors and the IPO? So the first time they're going to process that token on an exchange, for example, what is the vesting period? So the guys that invested very early, do they have a vesting period? Do they have a cliff period? So can they just dump the money directly once the token goes live on exchange? That is interesting and important. Does a lot of big entities hold a lot of coins of that project? So how many investors are there? Do they have a lot of investors that maybe hold 10% or 15% or 5%? Then it's a no-go for me. How many exchanges have that token listed right away? So do they have good liquidity? The big problem is, if you only have, let me say that, moonshot coins listed on decentralized exchanges, what is pretty simple to list, honestly you're going to provide a little bit of liquidity.
Speaker 2:You're going to provide the token and then, voila, you can buy it. Not very easy, voila, you can buy it. Not very easy, but you can buy it. Does they have listings already on bigger exchanges? Because these bigger exchanges, they make investigations and check a little bit, you know, does it make sense, can we do it, can we trust them, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I would say these are most likely the biggest topics. And how many coins or token are in circulating supply? Is it a brand new project? For sure, they will not have 100% in circulating supply, but do they have probably 30%, 40%, 50% in circulating supply? What is with the remaining? Do they have a plan for that? Is it vested? What is the vesting period, et cetera. So, and what I also like is taking a little bit of look into their social media channels, like Reddit, like what they're going to do on Discord, what they're going to do on X, what they're going to do on YouTube. Do they keep the information level high? Do they maybe hide a little bit? I don't know. So, yeah, there are multiple ways and I'm very risky when it comes to crypto investments. Honestly, I'm very, very risky, but it needs to fit to your life, to the way how you accept and treat money.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:So I'm probably not the best tip guy who can tell you what cryptos you should invest if you're very conservative. My girls they have 50% in Bitcoin. I mean not because they say so, because I say so Because I need to make sure that probably in five or eight years they can buy their first house with that or first flat with that. So my personal account, that is absolutely high risk.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you differentiating and, honestly, you provided so much information and I want to say, like that, it's a great point. Like people should analyze their own risk assessment, because there's people that are like only Bitcoin right, the only crypto they have is Bitcoin. That's what they believe in. It's proven in that way. You know and you're kind of right and that's fine too if you want to go that route. But then there's other folks like yourself, that are like it's almost like day trading or moonshotting. They're investing in futures. They're looking at these altcoins that are just launched. But even within that, in that risk that you're taking on, you're still diversifying the risk. You're still trying to insulate yourself based on plummets. Let's say, you lose the 3000, but one of the other buckets 100Xs. Well, that just made up for it and I know that's kind of the math you're doing in your mind.
Speaker 1:But I appreciate you saying this isn't for everybody right, this is a very niche way of getting into crypto. You need to understand finances. You need to understand finances. You need to understand how actual companies work and how they get funded and angel investors and all these things. If you don't want to get into that niche of things, you can just do Bitcoin. You can just do Bitcoin and Ethereum, right, you can just do that and that is a much more. I think for the more common millennial investor, that's probably going to be more of the spot than investing all this time into really understanding how these systems work, like you're doing. And so for those folks, before I let you go, for the people that haven't gotten, what is your one piece of advice? To those people, let's say they're at any age. Let's say they've either invested in the regular economy or they haven't. They're making enough money to have just a little bit of excess cash, even in this inflated system. What should they do?
Speaker 2:How do they get started. It's probably the boring advice I can give you, but this is the one that I learned very hard Be patient. I have a saying and I hope I can convert it pretty good from German to English but accept the time and you're going to give yourself. When you start your school career, when you start school, you're going to give yourself 10 years before you have a degree. If you go to university, you're going to have between six and eight years to get that title. If you're going to start a business, to make it really successful, I don't know two years, three years, four years, five years why you don't give your crypto investment and your financial freedom only three months. Just be patient. Make mistakes, go up again. Just adjust your protocol, adjust your way, how you work and make it repeatable. It's not all about getting rich and have a year for sure. Yeah, that would be the greatest thing, but that won't happen to you. Just make a plan, follow it. Adjust the plan, repeat it. It's after the bull run. It's before the bull run.
Speaker 1:I think that would be my advice, absolutely no, that's great advice. And start small, but start right, like actually start Amazing. Right, okay, so first of all, I'll put the link. If people want to buy a Tangent Wallet, you absolutely should, right, you can buy one, two or three cards. I'll put the link in the description for that. But, david, where can people find you, how can they use you as an education resource and tell us more about your channel and what you're putting out there?
Speaker 2:I would not recommend just searching for my channel. I mean, I can give you the link, but it's all in German. I started, honestly, english and German content, but YouTube don't like two languages, that's horrible, really.
Speaker 1:So you only do German now. Wow Okay, you only do German now. Youtube doesn't like the split.
Speaker 2:But, interestingly, the translation tools. They really got very well and they're going to auto-translate everything. I have not listened to myself auto-translated in English, but I can really highly recommend you just getting your hands on one of the pairs of the Tandem cards With Nico's link. You also get 10% discount. What's pretty amazing, what's pretty good. And we also have our Tandem Telegram channel. We have a Discord server. We also have our YouTube channel and there is everything in English. I can highly recommend you just check that out.
Speaker 2:I also had made a lot of cool videos. There is really one of the first videos that I did where I shot with the Calibre 22 on the Tangem card. I ran it over with a 10-ton forklifter in Granite Falls, north America, north Carolina. I burned it with a torch, I cooked it, I washed it, I froze it. I did everything with a card and it still works. I did everything with a card and it still works. I mean I have that card here and if you're going to check out the video, you will see that. So I also drilled it here with a drill bit and it still works. I mean this is really one of the first things that convinced me why that wallet is amazing. So yeah, but again, my channel is not so interesting. Just definitely check out the Tandem socials and get your hands on one of the cards to really have the safest way to store your crypto assets.
Speaker 2:And one last thing that I really want to make sure that everybody understand please do not trust any scammers, any support persons that want to help you. There is nobody out there on the market that gives you private chat on telegram, that gives you private chat on Discord, that asks you for your seed phrases, your passwords, or asks you to sign anything. You can also sign up by Wallet Connect to different dApps, decentralized finance applications and some of that. Dapp smart contracts are also wallet drains. So please be very careful. Somebody guides you to a page where you connect with Wallet Connect and should sign a contract that can instantly wipe your wallet. Please be very careful. Somebody guides you to a page where you connect with Wallet Connect and should sign a contract that can instantly wipe your wallet, and that is something that is really, really important. There are a lot of people out there on the market that only want the best from you and that is your money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you saying that because, just like in the fiat world, where you get text messages or an email link, there's a ton of scams in the crypto world and you have to protect yourself. Right, you have to understand what's going on, what's real, what's not real, and that's why the cold wallet, you know, like Tangent, is even more preferential because if you just put it there and you leave it alone and you just move it when you need it, you know you're good, right, it's perfect. Well, david, thank you so much, my friend, it's been great to talk to you. I mean, this is a wealth of information. I appreciate you sharing your story with us and, yeah, I think people are really going to like this discussion. I mean, it's different than what I've had on the show, but super pertinent based on today's standards and where we are with personal finance in the world.
Speaker 2:Thank you, nico, really appreciate it, and thank you very much for having me and also having Tanjum, on the show.
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