The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Bitcoiners Finding A Home w/ Daniel Sempere Pico aka Bitcoin Gandalf

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES We're thrilled to welcome Daniel Sempere Pico (aka Bitcoin Gandalf) to the show to catch on things. Daniel has been helping people build their personal or business brand and if you want to learn more about it, you can find it at https://youarethemonopoly.com/. Furthermore, I picked his brain about moving abroad as this is a topic that is coming up more frequently as the price of bitcoin continues to rise. If you want to follow Daniel on X / Twitter, you can find him at https://x.com/BTCGandalf From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/ Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. I'm Len the Legend, and today I'm going to be interviewing Daniel Sempere Pico, otherwise known as Bitcoin Gandalf. And Gandalf, or Daniel, has been traveling the world, and I'm going to hopefully pick his brain as for, you know, easy immigration to other countries as a Bitcoiner. But not just that, also catch up with what's going on with him because it's been a heck of a long time since we last talked to him on the show.

But either way, before I go any further, I've got to talk about the three sponsors of the show. Number one, we have EasyDNS.com. And this is a sponsor that's been with us for the longest period of time. What could you do with ezdns is, well, if you have a website that you already have established and you want to migrate it to a more reputable company, safer company, more private company, you could do that. So you can move all your web hosting files to ezdns.

Or if you plan to start up a website, you know, you have a business and you want to become more professional and have your own website. Well, they'll help you out with setting it up, getting it going, and you'll be established. Also, domain names. If you want to register a domain name or move it over, you could do it with EasyDNS. Web hosting. Mention that. Email hosting. Well, you have your own email server you could do that with them if you already have one established you could move it over or set up a new

one that's different options you have over there you could do Nostra relays you know a whole bunch of different things you could do with easy DNS check them out if you use our promo code cbp media you'll get 50 off your initial purchase what this enables you to do well just stock up right make this first purchase be extremely large so you're going to maximize your savings check them out easy dns.com second sponsor is bull bitcoin what can i say about them price of bitcoin is high so you can buy bitcoin with them or you want to sell you can sell bitcoin with them on chain lightning a lot of different options if you want to even use your bitcoin bull bitcoin will help you use it in a couple of different ways number one you got some bills to pay and well you could use your bitcoins to pay those bills so through bull bitcoin you could help facilitate the payment of those bills using your bitcoin very cool also you can't really spend your

bitcoin in the real world it's difficult to do so but they could help you out because they could sell you gift cards so you could trade your bitcoin for gift cards and those gift cards you could use in the real world so indirectly you are spending your Bitcoin and you're living on the Bitcoin standard just the way Satoshi wanted you to. Check them out. If you haven't opened an account yet with our promo code below, do so now. Because if you do and you provide

the necessary information and everything, you get $21 added to your account. They're non-custodial. This is the exchange you want to deal with. They're the best around. And unfortunately, they're only catering to Canadians right now. And even people in France, I believe. But either way, if you're in Canada, you could open up an account.

If you're elsewhere, you're probably SOL. Too bad. So sad. Third sponsor, we have Decentral Tech. And if you want to do home mining, these are the guys you want to talk to. You want to get a bidax. So quiet, efficient mining. You can do that. You want to go more powerful to get a BIDX, so quiet, efficient mining. You can do that.

You want to go more powerful, you can get S9, S19, S21. You can get all these different options. You get something that you can plug it into your regular 110-volt outlet, or you get something that you use 220. A lot of different options with them, so you get the loud, the quiet, everything in between. So you want to do a small setup for your garage or your own big farm. These are the guys to check out.

They are based in Canada. So if you're looking to mine in Canada, these are the guys you want to talk to. They are the best in the game. They provide great service. And if you have any questions, they'll be able to answer them for you ASAP. The Bidax is one of the big things they sell. Also, there's the CB. The Bidax is one of the big things they sell. Also, there's the CBP branded Bidax. I'm not sure if there's any left, but if there are, you may want to check them out

and buy one for yourself. And that's it for the sponsors. And with that, we could transition to the man of the hour. So without further ado, let's bring on the man of the hour, Daniel, aka Bitcoin Gandalf. Daniel, como estas? What's up, Len? Very good. Muy bien, muy bien. Thanks for having me back on. I appreciate you coming back on.

Whatever, I mean, first time I think you're coming on this show without any moniker, any sort of gimmick, anything that's covering your face. This is the first time I believe. No, no, no. I think I came on. I came on once when i was living in the isle of man i came on one time i think without the without the get up as well i'm curious why shun it what was the the rationale for getting rid of the whole BTC Gandalf gimmick? Well, so when I first opened, when I first started my Twitter account, I already had a Twitter under my real name and real face.

And I just had some stuff going on. I didn't want all my people in real life knowing that I was kind of obsessing over Bitcoin. And I remember following some people in real life knowing that I was like kind of obsessing over Bitcoin. And I just I remember following some people in crypto Twitter back in 2017, like 2016 2017. 2017 was the first time that I remember hearing about Bitcoin. So I signed I got on Twitter and I started following like people in the crypto Twitter space. And one of those people was crypto Cobain. And I just remember that a lot of people were anonymous in like the crypto Twitter space. And one of those people was Crypto Cobain. And I just remember that a lot of people were anonymous in like the crypto Twitter space. So I decided to make my account anonymous as well

for that reason. And for the fact that like, I already had an account under my real name, but then, and of course I wasn't expecting it, you know, I could have never imagined that I would be here right now and, you know, and that I would end up working in the Bitcoin space and all that. So, you know, when I got a job and I started going to conferences, uh, it was just, it became, everyone already knew my face. They, I would tell people my real name. So I wasn't really anonymous anymore. And it was kind of hard to like, it was easier to connect with people, with people once they recognize my face as well. Cause you know, I always had to have, I always had to like, is someone on Twitter? And if they are, I would be like, oh, you know, I'm Gandalf on Twitter, by the way.

And then they'd be like, oh, no way, I know you. So it's easy to connect under real name, real face. Plus, it ties in just with everything else I'm doing in terms of like, I'm doing some personal brand marketing consultancy stuff. And for that, I always recommend for my clients to, you know, if they want to build a personal brand to do it under their real, using their real name, real face. Now, I'm curious, I'm going to say the name, hopefully I pronounce it correct. Daniel Sempere Pico.

Very well said. That's right. Is that a Spanish background? Yeah. So I was born, my whole family is Spanish. I was born in Spain, but I've never lived there. Right. Okay.

But you speak some Spanish though. Yeah. So technically, so I was brought up bilingual, Portuguese and Spanish because my parents lived in, when I was born, my parents lived in Portugal and then we moved to Brazil. So I lived in Portugal and Brazil for the first eight years of my life before I moved to Hong Kong. So I was brought up speaking Spanish at home and Portuguese at school and with my friends. And then I moved to Hong Kong and I forgot how to speak Portuguese and learn English. I'm sure it would all come back to you if you were immersed in the environment for long enough, it would just all just click in. Yeah.

And it's very similar to Spanish as well. So yes, I can understand Portuguese. It's just a struggle to speak it. Yes. Now I want to go back to you going to conferences and everything. I would have imagined going there with the whole gimmick must have been just a pain in the ass,

just wearing it, keeping it on the beard must have oh no no so i never even wore the outfit to any conferences ever i just went you know like this but i've seen pictures of you going to conferences with them on i i uh so i did uh i was asked to speak at uh unconfiscatable 2022 on a panel called making bitcoin fun or like make bitcoin fun again or something like that and it was like me carla walker uh i think nico was on the panel as well from uh simply bitcoin and uh no he was moderating perhaps and uh ugly old goat which is a friend of tone vase uh and so we all dressed up.

What a name. Carla was wearing her orange wig, and Walker was wearing this knight, like a Roman soldier helmet. And I wore my Gandalf outfit because I knew I was going to be filmed and put on the internet. I wasn't showing my face then.

And it was about making Bitcoin fun, so I dressed up as a wizard for that specifically. But that's the only time I think I've done it. Now you're living in the UAE Dubai specifically. I want to know what the heck is up with you since like the last time we caught up because a lot has transitioned in your life between then and now. And I'd love to keep listeners and viewers up to date with what's going on with you. Yeah, so I moved from the Isle of Man to Dubai. I was working at Brains. I was still working at Brains the last time we spoke. Yeah. So when I started my BTC Gandalf account, I eventually ended up transitioning out of my real estate business and real estate career and sort of

into marketing and Bitcoin. So I was working in marketing at Brains for almost three years. At the end of last year, I sort of wanted to get back to doing my own thing again. So I left brains. My family was also looking to change it up from Isle of Man. So my sister had moved to Dubai, my mom had moved to Dubai. And we were deciding between moving, either moving back to Hong Kong, which is where I lived for 25 years. And my wife and I met and got married in Hong Kong as well. So we were toying up the idea of either moving back to Hong Kong, which is where I lived for 25 years. And my wife and I met and got married in Hong Kong as well. So we were toying up the idea of either moving back to Hong Kong or moving to Dubai. And we did a holiday,

visited both places with our daughters. And we just liked Dubai better. We felt it was a bit more family friendly. And we also have the pull, of course, of having my sister and her family here and my mom here as well. Is it easy to get into Dubai as an international, somebody without a visa? What's the story?

What's the process? Because the reason being, there's a lot of people in this neck of the woods where I'm about is that people are trying to look at life in the next few years. And maybe things over here may not transition the way things can. So it's going to be going into a direction they're not happy in. in the next few years. And maybe things over here may not transition the way things can. So it's going to be going into a direction they're not happy. And so they're looking for somewhere else to, to, you know, establish their roots.

How easy is it to get into Dubai? I wouldn't recommend Dubai. It's terrible here. They shouldn't come. I'm joking. No, it's awesome. There's obviously like people from all over the world flocking here because,

you know obviously it's very tax friendly the quality of life is super high it's a modern international city it's like well connected good medical system everything runs pretty smoothly um so there's a lot of people moving here in terms of getting in terms of moving here from a like you, if you're not a UAE citizen and you don't have a visa, it's the easiest place I've ever gotten a visa. And I've lived in maybe five or six countries. It's the easiest place to get a visa. So I came here on what's called a freelance visa. So you essentially set up like a, you get a trading, like a business license

as a sole trader. And then you can apply for a visa under that business license. But you don't have to open a company or anything. This is just literally you're a sole trader. So it's like you're self-employed. You're allowed to work for businesses. You're not allowed to hire anyone. And I don't think you're allowed to like sell your services to individuals

um and you can get that visa you don't have to have any income you don't have to have i think i only presented my passport that's pretty much it they asked me for some they asked me for like a bit of proof of you know the work that that i was like working in the thing that i said i was doing i think i put like you there's categories of um of like activities and i think i put like so you know social media marketing uh and like there was like social media influencer that you have you can put like three and i put like copywriter or something as well because that's what i was doing and then i just like basically gave him a google doc that said like you know uh i was working in marketing at brains like here's my twitter account here's like all these podcasts i've been on that sort of thing and that was it

yeah within like it was it was literally uh i think i got it within like a week or two weeks could you imagine the yeah you submit the the application. I'm a shit poster. I'm a big one. Let me in. Pretty much. I mean, I sent them my account. So you can get, so you can get what the visas that you can get under a business are two years,

one or two years. So I've actually like switched. I've opened a company now and i'm switching my visa to my company uh i said to be under my company and in terms i mean i don't really pick your brain here i'm curious cost of living what's it like over there compared to other places you lived so i always measure everything to hong kong which is like the most expensive place in the world to live yeah so it seems cheap by comparison it is cheap it is cheaper by comparison like i live in a four-bedroom house like it's called a villa here um essentially it's like a semi-detached house so i've got like

neighbors on one side but not on the other got it yeah yeah so i live in like a four it's got outdoor space like four car driveway it's in a complex with like a swimming pool a gym uh like a mall that has a supermarket a pharmacy that's very it's very common like these type these sort of like villa complexes are very common here in dubai and uh it's the same price as what i used to pay for a, like a tiny two bedroom apartment in a very old, like 50 or 60 year old building in Hong Kong. But it's still very expensive. I would imagine in Hong Kong, as you're mentioning this, I was saying like, I think my, say my two bedroom apartment was like maybe two and a half thousand us or between two and a half and 3000 us. Yeah. That's,

but it was very centrally located. Like now I live really far out of the city. Was it any trouble for you getting a license, getting a car driving over there? And, uh, it was so, no, you,

if you have most licenses are directly transferable to, to a UAE license, not, not Isle of Man though. So, and normally like my wife, my wife and i moved from uk to isle of man so we transferred our licenses over to isle of man and then uh from isle of man to hong kong is not transferable but i had a hong kong license and she switched her license back to uk

before we we moved and then switched our uk one to u. So for most places, it's transferable. What about like integration into the society over there? Because obviously you've been around the world, so you're able to fluidly adapt to different situations. But how is it over there? Because from what I see, it's a very conservative society for women. Like how easy is it to integrate into dubai i mean it's the so obviously uh some muslim women choose to like you know wear their hijab and like cover up and everything but there's also

women with like their tits out and like you know their butt cheeks sticking out of their of their shorts so there isn't you know and people you know and you hear people like oh if you kiss in public or if you show you know i've seen people holding hands, kissing in public, hugging, making out, never is, I've never seen it be an issue. And there's scantily clad women and there's women that are fully covered up. So it's a bit of everything. What people don't realize here is that something like 95,

let's just say over 90% of the population is expatriate or immigrant yeah so the the uae the uae so the like there's only like a million maybe emirati citizens and the rest is foreign the rest and i think i think like i think indian i think indian is the so the largest population here is indian but it's the most multi multicultural place i've ever visited or lived in in my entire life like there's there's languages like you know i've traveled enough around the world that i can recognize i thought i could recognize most languages at least be like oh that's dutch that's german that's french that's whatever there's languages being spoken here i'm like i have absolutely no idea where that's from like i can't even point in the right direction it's a melting pot over there that's awesome

yeah yeah how many lambos do you see a day uh there's a couple where i live i mean there's like there's nice cars everywhere here there's nice cars everywhere there's also like a lot of shit there's a lot of shit boxes as well. Really? There's a mix of everything. Yeah, there's a lot. Like the amount of Nissan Sunnies and like, you know, not even, yeah, I guess

Toyota Yaris's and stuff like that. That's fucked up. I mean, there's a mix of everything. It's just the perception I have of that place. It's just extremely wealthy. But I guess you get a broad range

of the spectrum. You have to have moderately income coming in and also high income. And so people are going to drive cars accordingly. That's associated with their salary. There's a lot of migrant workers here who are doing more of the blue-collar type type jobs and so obviously they're not driving around in Lambos

and then there's like the ultra wealthy people who are driving around in Lambos and I think just because of like the kind of people that are more likely to move to Dubai are the ones for whom like if they can save 20 or 30 or 40% of their wealth in terms of taxes. It's a massive amount. If you live somewhere and you make an average income, it's not worth moving to Dubai because you're not saving enough in taxes. But if you're making millions and millions of dollars, it makes a lot of sense to come here because you can save a lot.

I want to just transition quickly to that. Is that a place for Bitcoiners as well to go flock to? Or is it just something personal for you that you went there? Yes, we were in. So I was living in Scotland and my wife and I had made the decision to move to Scotland before I got into Bitcoin. So then I got into Bitcoin and then I realized like, oh, you know, not the friendliest place towards Bitcoin. And like taxation wise, I want to be able to spend my Bitcoin without having to keep a spreadsheet of like what I'm buying, what I'm selling and all of that. And I was like, so this is not really tenable. And I was also selling my business in Hong Kong.

So I was like, I need to move somewhere that's more tax friendly and get set up for all of that. And an opportunity came up to do a contract role for Coin Corner. They're an exchange over in the Isle of Man. So just kind of all lined up at the same time. And we decided to move there. Now, our plan was to stay there indefinitely. But it was just a bit too, you know, it's a bit too isolated isolated a bit too quaint for uh for our liking especially just i guess what we were used to you know we are used to hong kong and then going to isle of man

is a is a massive change i enjoyed it my wife was struggling with it a bit more than i was because generally like since i left part of the reason i left hong kong is like i knew i wanted to eventually start a new business and i know i need to do that like i need to get my head down and and work. So I was like, I don't want the social... In Hong Kong, I have my lifelong friends there. So there's a lot of social distractions and I just didn't want to have that.

So everywhere I've gone, I've just kept to myself, shit posts on Twitter, work, occasionally travel to conferences and spend time with my family. I'm not really socializing or doing stuff outside of those things. That's awesome. You got the priorities straight. The weather must be shit

in Isle of Man as well, right? At least for me. It's very windy. It's very, very windy. It's very wet. It can be very cold. It goes dark at 3 p.m. or 3.30 p.m. in the winter.

Summer's lovely, though. Where you are now, how do you deal with the summers? I mean, it's always summer, it seems like, over there, but what do you do with it? Yeah, it's just levels of... Here, it's like levels of heat. Although, to be fair, now from November to February, March,

at night, it can go down to like 13 degrees in the coldest parts of the year but and during the day maybe it goes to like 25 degrees and it's a dry heat so it's really nice like now now it's like lovely going outside in the summer it's there's a couple of months july and august are literally hell you just don't go outside really yeah i can manage i can i can just about manage like a you know i tried to get out for a walk at like five or six a.m and then another one at like seven or eight p.m but besides that the only thing that like my family that the only thing we did on the weekends is pretty much just go to the mall

it's the only thing you can do just go we just go to the mall have lunch which is interesting because in hong kong i think the, you shower, you finish showering, you're sweating already. Oh, yeah. Hong Kong, it's a different kind of heat. It can get humid here as well, but Hong Kong is just always humid. So you're always moist and sweaty, and it can also get really hot, like 33, 35 degrees.

So it's not like in Hong Kong you can get out and about and do stuff. I would say it's more bearable to go outside in Hong Kong than it is here. Like in Hong Kong, if you really, you know, if you get your sports gear on and you're like, I'm going to sweat, it's fine. You can go for a hike. It's going to be warm. You're going to, it's going to be hot, but you can survive. If you try to do that here, you will be fried to death because it's like 45, 50 degrees

Celsius. Yeah. Yeah. I got gotta ask you. Because you've been involved in real estate in the past. Is real estate a shit coin? Yes. Explain. I mean, as an investment, it's just, compared to Bitcoin,

it's no dice. Like, it's hard to sell. If you're buying it to rent out, you have to deal you're buying it to rent out you have to deal with the with tenants people underestimate how much work that is uh the margins aren't great you know in terms of like your mortgage versus the rent you can your rental yield margins are pretty thin so if you want to pay somebody to manage your property if you you know if you pay

them a property manager uh and then you're like places empty for two months between tenancies like you can wipe out a lot of your profits yeah yeah there's so many risks involved with that you just don't know when you're depending where you live depending where you live they can make more houses like it's not like you know it's hard it's it's harder to make than other assets but it it's still like in Dubai, for example, they're building like 50,000 new units or something like that in the next like year or so. So they need massive net migration to fill those places. Things can, you know, the government,

you know, a government can be voted in that suddenly is like, oh, we're going to increase taxes. And then like everyone leaves. I'm not saying about that here. Just generally, you know, there's a lot of factors you can't control. Whereas like Bitcoin, it's very liquid. You can press a button and sell it. You know, if you need cash today, you can press one button and sell it. Imagine if you're in a pit, you know, if you're heavily invested in real estate and you need cash in a pinch more difficult to liquidate i guess you can like refinance and blah but it's just it's it's no dice yeah there's no comparison

between the two but there's one thing that uh home and i'm not trying to sell real estate as the bln end all we have to live somewhere i can't live in your bitcoin so somewhere you're gonna have to have either rent or buy something to live in. But beyond that, a hundred percent Bitcoin is the way to go. Because I guess you can't live in your Bitcoin. You got, I mean, I'm not saying I, I'm not someone that's like against owning your home.

I just don't think people should look at it. Like most people, for most people, their home is their biggest asset. Yep. Right. And it doesn't make any sense because yeah, if you need,

you know, the day you need the money you're homeless yeah because you have to sell it right yeah um so i think it makes sense you i think it makes sense to buy a home if you treat it sort of like as a display you know i know you're not going to lose probably not going to lose money on it or whatever but uh i'd rather use and use a bitcoin or something else as my store of value thing and a home is pretty much like i'm buying it so i don't have to worry about having to move if my landlord's trying to increase the rent or sells the house or whatever right

um but i would have to have like a substantial amount of i wouldn't sell like you know half my bitcoin stash to buy a house or anything like that. It would have to be some sliver of the stack to buy a place. Yeah, there's got to be some balance between the two. And to be perfectly honest, if I look at my situation, I got my house in 2008. If I didn't buy it and simply just bought Bitcoin and rented, I'd be in a far better place. But mentally, I am in a different state because I own this place. I don't have to think about anything. I just pay my mortgage every two weeks.

And it just, you know, I still buy my Bitcoin in the side. But there's a level of comfort I have with owning it. Real estate is definitely a shit coin. But I mean, you can also, I mean, if you've had your if you've had your place for, you know, for that long, people like you can also refinance. They pull some equity out. If you want to buy some corn you still have your house you have more money in bitcoin you're leveraged sure but it's like that's pretty pretty much one of some one of the safest ways i would say to leverage 100 and do bank will

be more than willing to give me any money because there's equity in the home and they could get it you know if they force me out it's theirs no they're happy at that point but um there's something i i missed i wanted to talk about earlier you are the monopoly.com yes i want to talk about that what is that and how is it going it's good so uh yeah so when i left brains i didn't really i didn't know specifically what i was going to do i just knew that with i just knew I enjoyed writing. I enjoyed writing and Twitter was going really well. And so I knew that I could figure something out with that. Uh, and yeah, the, you are, I explored a few things. I'm working on a book that I just, that's just for like pure fun sort of thing. Um, but just, uh, talking to people and like people are reaching out to me and asking

me, Oh, will you do this for me? Will you do that for me? And just like sort of getting a signal from what people were wanting from me. I decided to start like a half agency, half consulting. So I'm doing I'm ghostwriting for people. So helping them build their personal brand. But like for mostly for like founders and executives who are too busy to spend time on twitter and produce content themselves um i ghost write for them so we get on a call every so often i ask them you know i come prepared with questions and sort of like general topics i want to hit and they just talk and then i basically just turn their answers into content for them so sorry go ahead yeah i was gonna say that's one part that's one side of the business is ghost writing uh the other side is i'm working with like creators consultants anyone really that wants to build a personal brand and the concept is that you know if you combine if you have a business plus your personal brand you can turn your business into a monopoly. This could be monetized too on X too,

because as you grow on there, they're paying for eyeballs on every post, right? So there's a way to monetize that as well. But furthermore, have you even introduced people to Noster? No, so I'm doing, well, I mean, if somebody wanted me to write on Noster for them, that I would do that. Most people want to do X or LinkedIn so far in terms of ghostwriting,

in terms of like, in terms of the consulting side of things. Yeah, clients are mostly for written content, clients are mostly sticking to LinkedIn and Twitter just because that's where most people are. Nostra is still a very niche thing and only one of my clients

is working in the Bitcoin space. The other ones are different industries. So it's inherent on you to orange peel all these fellas. I mean, I barely... It'd be hard for me to sell someone on Nosta because I barely use it myself now.

I'm like the 1%. Well, to be fair, some of my clients are Bitcoiners. I just don't, they don't have a Bitcoin business. So they're just like, you know, they have a consulting practice or whatever. And they just have Bitcoin as like their savings or their you know as an investment in terms of like myself i'm gonna just say what i'm not on linkedin and i'm a nostril so i'm the total anomaly with this yeah i don't know why because for me i don't deal with linkedin i don't know why it would help me out for my but i can understand other people too because there's a lot of professionals on there it's a good way to network and yeah correct i have somebody's doing i have somebody selling

b2b consulting so linkedin is perfect for them yeah now you're talking about your book you're not going to just just throw that out there and just run away from that i want to hear more about this book yeah so um one of the things that like uh sort of popped off was I was doing these crazy historical Bitcoin stories. I was just like writing threads about historical Bitcoin events. And one of the, so I was going to start to, I was then working on an outline for a like crazy historical Bitcoin stories book. And in coming up with the, I was going to, it was going to be like 21 stories, maybe over three books.

Um, and one of those stories was so good that I was like, this needs to be its own book. And so I decided to just focus on that as a first book, uh, first. Any idea when this may be released? Uh, I've got like 20,000, uh, sort of like unorganized words written down already. Uh, but I started, I started it before I started doing this, like consulting and ghostwriting things. So that's now taking up the majority of my time. And I haven't really worked on the book in like a month and a half or two months. Um, so it's not really, uh, you priority is the business that's the that's that's what pays for the bills and stuff and the book is just when as and when i can so i was trying to get it

done by the end of this year but it's i don't think it's going to happen because i'm quite busy with uh with clients and i'm launching more offers and getting more clients and stuff so we'll see but it won't be a long book uh it's basically, it's the story of Wences Casares. He's like Michael Saylor before Michael Saylor. So he orange-pilled a bunch of Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires. He orange-pilled like Reid, what's his name? Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. Mike Novogratz.

There's a ton of, Bill Miller, the value investor. He orange-pilled a bunch of people back in the day. I actually think that he's partly responsible for the 2013 bull run because he got so many millionaires and billionaires into Bitcoin all around the same time that back then, the amount of money they were plowing into Bitcoin

would have made it skyrocket. Yeah. And then he started Zappobank. the amount of money they were plowing into Bitcoin would have made it skyrocket. Yeah. And then he started Zappo Bank. So they were quite famous in 2015, 2016, because they had these underground Swiss military bunkers where they were storing keys offline. And they were the biggest custodian of bitcoin in the world at one point

and then coinbase custody bought them well coinbase custody bought their institutional uh bitcoin custody business and that's how they ended up with the grace that's how that's how coinbase has ended up becoming the biggest custodian in the world now is because they bought zappo institutional custody they had the grayscale bitcoin back in the day so that i didn't know that coinbase yeah yeah so when when says cassar's uh like life story is insane he was already probably worth hundreds of millions before he found bitcoin in 2011 um he was an early internet entrepreneur so he started like latin americans first uh online brokerage and sold that to banco santander for half a billion dollars in like nine and uh just before the dot-com bubble burst literally like weeks before in 2000 did you see about cynthia lummis that she proposed

i think it was her that proposed a bill about yeah it was it was proposed it was proposed that um it was proposed at bitcoin 2024 so they they want to roll over the US's current Bitcoin holdings, which if you have a look, the CEO of Brains did a thread about this recently, and he sort of like netted out Bitcoin that doesn't belong to the US. Like they have the Bitfinex Bitcoin, you know, the one that the Bitfinex, that Razul Khan and Ilya stole from Bitfinex.

That's like 105,000 Bitcoin or something like that. That's in their 210,000 Bitcoin stash. So once that gets removed, it's like 95,000 Bitcoin. They've already got authorization to sell 60 something thousand Bitcoin that they hold from Silk Road, from someone who hacked it from the Silk Road, I think. So those Bitcoin could potentially be sold before then, or if they're already like earmarked to be sold. I don't know what the like legal stat, because this went to court. This was like these Bitcoins were sort of locked, locked in a legal battle uh for however long some people are claiming it was theirs from a bankruptcy estate anyway it's not clear what will happen to this bitcoin would you put it past the

democrats to sell it before trump gets an office i wouldn't so there could be 69 000 other bitcoin that they sell the bitfinex bitcoin is going to bitfinex i don't think the u.s government can i mean of course they can just be like sorry change our minds. Good luck to you and steal it. But then I wouldn't be supportive of that. I wouldn't be supportive of a US strategic Bitcoin reserve that's stolen Bitcoin from companies in the Bitcoin space. Well, there's always the talk of them purchasing or accumulating a million BTC over a five-year period of time. And I assume that cannot be done through confiscation. It would have to be done through purchasing, right? Has any merit to that? I mean, I don't believe that it would be done

through confiscation, but there's a million Bitcoin in between all the Bitcoin ETFs, and they're all being custodied by Coinbase in the US. So I wouldn't- No, they would never do it. I can't... I don't think they would. I don't think so either, but they could if they wanted to. I don't think... Sure.

It's within the realm of possibility. No, of course. But again, like we're all like, and the Fed, you know, the money printing is theft. And then people are like cheering that, oh, it's okay to print money if you buy Bitcoin.

Like I agree that buying Bitcoin is a better use of the printed dollars than other stuff they might do. But it's not necessarily like... I would personally prefer a smaller government that is less involved in these things. I would just rather them get... They don't need a Bitcoin strategic reserve. If they just cut the size of a government, get the hell out the way and let people just like have a smaller government, let the private sector do its thing.

I think that ship is sealed for the US though. I'm not trying to defend whatever. Yeah, I understand. I mean, look, at the end of the day, if they're going to pop my bags, great. You know, I don't live in the US. I'm talking more like principles and my principles and my my principles

and values but at the end of the day if they print my if they print dollars to buy bitcoin pumps my bags i can you know i have more money to send my kids to school and like go on holidays with my family and take care of like the people closest to me and that's mainly what i care about so uh thank you u.s well it kind of just shines a light what El Salvador has done and they've done the right thing. A smaller country that abolished their native currency, they adopted the US as their national,

US dollar as their national currency. So they had so little to lose and a heck of a lot to gain by just simply adopting a Bitcoin strategy. And they've done that at a right time. And I think they're still buying one Bitcoin a day, to the best of my knowledge.

So they've done it right. And that's the ones you're going to be looking at, those smaller countries that could, they don't have a lot really to lose by just going the Bitcoin route. And I hope that none of them look at the price of Bitcoin and say the ship has sailed, it's too late now. In my opinion, it's not too late.

This thing is going to run up quite a bit. But I think what Alcelver has done, it's a copy-pasta. They could do this over and over again in many other countries out there. And others are mining, like Bhutan, for instance, or Ethiopia. They're mining Bitcoin. They have some Bitcoin on their balance sheet

and they're not going out there and just simply printing money to do it. They're doing proof of work to get it. So that's pretty cool to see that. Bitcoin's still a minuscule asset class when you compare it to other asset classes. And I honestly think that over the next 10, 15, 20 years, you'll see more and more people using Bitcoin as their main store of value over S&P 500, over real estate, over bonds. You know, even if it's just getting to the price of gold we've got another 10x to do

from here assuming gold doesn't move anymore yeah right now so that's like the bear case is 10 you know the bear case for me is a 10x holy shit did you see the inflows oh sorry no i was just gonna say like it's a no-brainer are from our generation and even slightly older like i'm a millennial is a generation above millennials gen x is that right i think so i'm an x anyway what i'm from i think yeah from i think from gen x like they're not going to be buying gold uh you already see a lot of people like who are selling real estate to buy Bitcoin. If Bitcoin consistently outperforms, the reason why the S&P 500 index fund became a thing and became like a way, you know, the meme that you just like put your money in S&P 500 index fund,

you get 10% per year compounded over your 20 or 30 years, you can retire off that money, right? I think that's what Bitcoin is going to become that next thing. Because the reason why that exists is because the S&P 500 is consistently returned 10% per year. And so people just see as like a safe bet that it's like a sure thing. If Bitcoin can do the same thing over the next 20 or 30 years, or even over the next like 10 or 15 years, so we have like a 30 year history we can point back to and say, look, Bitcoin has gone up compounded 30% per 25 per year then somebody will write the book that means that the that

bitcoin is the best store of value asset and then everyone will just start stacking bitcoin instead of s&p 500 index or there'll be more money flowing into it right there's corporations are barely in institutions are barely in countries are barely in countries are barely in like the map the vast majority of wealth in the world is barely dipping their toes in bitcoin did you look at the inflow for the bitcoin etf versus the gold etf somebody posted a chart the gold etf year one versus the bitcoin etf we still haven't finished year one in the united states and it's off the chart with respect to it so in terms of uh adoption sorry gone i was like within adoption people they seem to love the bitcoin etf versus the gold etf

and you're talking about the gold etf being like one point or gold in general being like a one 14 trillion, 15 trillion dollar market cap. That may lend credence to what you're saying, because just how much interest there is in the Bitcoin ETF versus the gold ETF when it was released. It just seems like there's way more interest with Bitcoin. I thought I thought it's I thought what I saw was flows into the Bitcoin ETF were already more than one of the gold ETFs in their entire history, 15 years or something. But it wasn't GLD. It was another one. Either way, that just shows you how much interest there is in one compared to the other. Granted, the dollar today versus then, it's way more valuable then than it is now.

So you can't say a dollar per dollar makes sense. But still, the interest, for whatever reason, people love Bitcoin versus... Yeah. I just never knew anyone who... I mean, okay, I bought silver in 2006 because I fell for the whole narrative of the industrial use of silver

and it's going to pump the price up and whatever else. Yeah. I did my university dissertation on silver as an asset yeah you're psyoped into it yeah yeah and i still hear that narrative today like that you know the industrial case of silver um yeah i mean i don't know anyone that owns gold. It's pretty much, it feels like it's just pretty much central banks and, you know, a few institutions and hedge funds that used it as like a, you know, flight to safety asset. But it feels like the holder base of Bitcoin is much broader than gold the one that really turned me off on gold was when um russia's gold was confiscated by the courts in the uk after russia invade invaded ukraine russia was unable to patriot repatriate its gold the the the courts just said sorry this is you know not your not your gold not your like that's pretty shitty. Like, I understand what Russia did. You know, somebody may look at it and say that was terrible.

But it shows you that possession is nine-tenths the law when it comes to gold. Yeah, 100%. It's very hard to custody. There's a lot of fakery and forgery. There's very high margins. Like like if you're trying to take a physical bar of gold to like a pawn shop or like to a gold dealer and buy and sell like they take a massive percentage or the spread between what they buy and what they sell at is huge if gold price pumps you know gold miners are have are incentivized to go out and find more

gold deposits and mine more gold you can't do any of those things with Bitcoin. It's much easier to verify. It's much easier to sell. It's impossible to make more than what's programmatically going to be made, no matter how high Bitcoin goes. Touched upon Silk Road earlier about the US, they have some of the confiscated gold from there. What do you think about Ross being freed by Trump? Yeah, I hope it happens. I don't know a whole lot about the specifics, you know, of the case. I just know that it seems like where I'd part from is like, should he have had some jail time maybe maybe not i don't really like know if he did anything that was like against the law that they you know could have like locked

him up for three or four years what it does seem is that he was like massively unjustly punished right given a given a sentence that's far more severe than the any crimes he may have committed and that's why he's already been in there for what 10 years that's probably longer than i think any of the things that i sort of know that he might have done so i'm glad he gets to be free plus as a bitcoiner silk road did a massive amount to get bitcoin on the map uh so many people's stories of like the first time they heard about Bitcoin or they owned some Bitcoin is buying drugs on the Silk Road. So yeah, let's see. Again, it's one of those things like I, you know, the evidence points to the fact that Trump is going to free Ross. He said he's going to do it, whatever, but it remains. Day one. I also, day one. Yeah, exactly. I don't know about

day one, but we live in a bubble right if you look at general trump speeches he's not talking about bitcoin he only talks about bitcoin to us as in two bitcoiners right there's specific targeted messages uh you know at a bitcoin conference at the libertarian party conference you know uh an interview here and there he might pepper in a comment or whatever but he's not running on a broad bitcoin platform right he's not going to like some small town in pennsylvania and being like you know you should all save in bitcoin bitcoin's gonna he's not doing that at all he's running on the inflation and immigration is like his main two main points for the general population so

let's see if when he gets in there, because even though we raised, I guess, Bitcoin as the crypto industry raised quite a bit of money for him, it'll be interesting to see what happens once he's in there, because I don't buy into this whole 100 million Bitcoin holders in the US or whatever Coinbase tries to always make it seem

like there's 50 million people holding crypto or whatever. I still think we're like tiny, maybe a few million people in the US. Yeah. Perhaps in Bitcoin. Most of those are not like hardcore Bitcoiners. Like we live in the Bitcoin Twitter echo chamber. So we think everyone, you know, we think everyone is like us, but we're a tiny minority. And so I wouldn't

be surprised if once he gets in, there's like, thanks for the votes, guys. Screw you. And well, one thing that's going to be a wildcard here is he can't run for another term as president. This is his last thing. So there's nothing he's going to be doing with trying to, with thoughts of I got to run again. I've got to put something in place that I've got to try to buy votes or win votes next time around. He doesn't need to do that. He just has this term.

He just has to think about this term. For better or for worse, he's going to work with that for a four-year plan, and that's that. So I think that's a bit of a wild card. So he doesn't have to pander to anybody, really. Yeah, but you just made me think of something he could easily he could easily do the old you know start the bitcoin strategic reserve

you know the u.s holds bitcoin for the next however many years four years and then when he's out of office and somebody else wins and let's say it's the democrats and you know bitcoin's up 5x from there they're like yeah we're gonna you know somebody could run on the we're gonna sell the bitcoin strategic reserve and we're gonna start a fund for you know black entrepreneurs you're gonna get a 20 i'm saying that because that's what carmela recently said right she's gonna start a fund for black entrepreneurs and give them 20 grand yes guaranteed by the government so essentially it's a handout it's not even a loan the best way they can default on it and and not pay back so somebody could run on a platform that they're going to take that money and give it to the population which is usually

what uh it's usually what pop uh politicians do right is they uh they buy your vote by whoever can give you the most free shit imagine they time locked it. They bought the Bitcoin. Exactly. Lots of different things. You know, getting close to the hour, I don't want to keep you too much longer because, you know, I understand you're quite busy. But I just have one last question for you. Are you still doing coding at all? No, but you know what? So when I, just for context for the audience, when I was trying to figure out what to do,

I knew it was going to be like, I knew I wanted to leverage the power of the internet and technology, right? So it was like, I was thinking between going media or going code in terms of like the direction I wanted to go with what I wanted to do next. And at one point I decided I wanted to, it was going to be coding. And so I spent a couple of months where I was coding. I made a web app that pulled the Bitcoin price from a bunch of different APIs from different exchanges and just made an average Bitcoin price.

And it would tick over every second. It would tick up and down and flash green or red if it was going up or down, just to practice. But it was just when... So um just like to practice but it was just when so this was like in march april 2023 so just as chat gpt was becoming big and my the it was so even back then it was so incredible you know i don't know that much about coding and stuff i know the basics but it was so easy to build this stuff just by telling chat gpt what i wanted it to do and knowing a little bit of the basics of like html css and javascript it was insane uh and so

now with tools like cursor uh there's um i think there's one called like v0 or something which is like for uh like wireframing and making like the m version of something. And then that with cursor replet, it seems like you could build anything with very little, with just some like very basic foundational coding knowledge. So sometimes I am tempted to like, I get shiny object syndrome and I'm like, Oh, it'd be cool if I could, you know, go back to, yeah. But I'm just trying to focus, you know, I felt the pain of switching careers and like

basically letting a decade's worth of, you know, some skills are transferable to what I'm doing now, which is great. But like some specific knowledge of real estate industry and specifically in Hong Kong, it's very painful to switch and leave that knowledge behind and start again, because a lot of the gains come from like compounding experience and knowledge over years and years and years and so what i'm trying to really focus on now is like develop my writing copywriting abilities uh and the consulting thing and then maybe you know in 10 years time when i'm sort of like maybe bored of this or like i'm so good that it like takes up less of my time or whatever then maybe i will do some coding i'll try the coding thing just on the side for fun not like

trying to switch careers again but just on the side for fun build stuff and if that ever goes into anything then great but i i don't think i don't see myself ever like just leaving what i'm doing now to do something else again this is this going to be it for like for a while and anything else will be a side hustle. That's no, you enjoy doing what you're doing. It looks like building your strengths and, uh,

and your weaknesses you could work on in the future. So that's, that's the way to do it. It's we've, you know, close to an hour. I appreciate you taking time to come on any last words. I'll let you build the next block here.

Uh, anything else you want to say to pump your products, uh, before we just i want to pass the baton over to you yeah no i uh people can just follow me on on twitter at btc gandalf uh from there you'll be able to see anything i'm up to uh and yeah if you're if if i have an offer for for either consulting or ghostwriting it'll be on there or Or you can go to youarethemonopoly.com, sign up to my email list. And I also send offers out to my email list. And I send occasional emails. Sometimes it's daily, depending on how many things I have to say. Sometimes it's daily. Sometimes it's a few times a week. But I talk about personal branding on there.

And that's also where if I have open slots to work with clients, that's where I let people know. And I occasionally post it on Twitter as well. Although I like to keep Twitter mostly for shit posting and talking about Bitcoin. I love it. Daniel, I appreciate you coming on. So we'll be back at this again Monday. And with that, take care.