The Pomp Podcast - #797 Bitcoin In Your Retirement Account w/ Ryan Radloff

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Ryan Radloff Is The CEO of Choice By Kingdom Trust. Choice is the first company to offer their users the option to purchase Bitcoin and place it into their retirement account. This allows individuals to achieve the tax free benefits of holding an appreciating asset, while still holding their personal Bitcoin. In this conversation, we discuss the savings crises in America, the problem with current retirement accounts, and what you at home can do in order to leverage the savings technology of Bitcoin in the most tax efficient way possible. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Crypto is all about democratization and freedom of choice. But many companies limit their offerings to centralized trading products. The crypto companies leading the pack in terms of innovation are those that extend access to the industry's cutting-edge products and services — bridging CeFi and DeFi. If you're searching for a platform that reflects crypto's promise of a more open and less restrictive financial future, look no further than OKEx. On OKEx now you can easily switch over to the new DeFi mode, connect OKEx's bespoke Web 3.0 wallet via browser extension and start exploring opportunities at the bleeding edge of crypto. From the DeFi Dashboard, you can monitor your portfolio of self-custodied assets across a range of blockchain networks and generate passive income from yield-farming with top DeFi protocols. In the NFT Marketplace, you can participate in exclusive drops and trade nonfungible tokens without secondary market fees. Meanwhile, the GameFi section is your portal to the latest and greatest in play-to-earn and blockchain gaming. Venture to the forefront of crypto innovation and connect with OKEx DeFi today. =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off ryan radloff is the ceo of kingdom trust where he is focused on accelerating the market shift into alternative asset investing specifically hard assets through a combination of technology and regulatory ip in this conversation we talk about bitcoin retirement accounts the saving crisis in America and what you at home can do in order to leverage the savings technology that is Bitcoin in the most tax-efficient way possible. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ryan, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk

about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low-latency technology, LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services. If you've never heard of LMAX Digital, it's probably because you're not an institution.

They have no retail, only institutions. They feature a central limit-order book streaming spot Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, all paired with U.S. dollars, euro, and yen. LMAX Digital. They're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. Learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash pomp. Again, lmaxdigital.com. Next up is Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's largest

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Start mining your own Bitcoin today by visiting compassmining.io. Again, compassmining.io. Go check them out and let me know what you think. Last but not least are my friends over at OKEx. Crypto is all about democratization and freedom of choice, but many companies limit their offerings to centralized trading products. The crypto companies leading the pack in terms of innovation are those that extend access to the industry's cutting edge products and services, bridging CeFi and DeFi. If you're searching for a platform that reflects crypto's promise of a more open and less restrictive financial future, look no further than OKEx. On OKEx now, you can easily switch over to the new DeFi mode.

Connect OKEx's bespoke Web3 wallet via browser extension and start exploring opportunities at the bleeding edge of crypto. From the DeFi dashboard, you can monitor your portfolio of self-custodied assets across a range of blockchain networks

and generate passive income from yield farming with top DeFi protocols. In the NFT marketplace, you can participate in exclusive drops and trade non-fungible tokens without secondary market fees. Meanwhile, the GameFi section

is your portal to the latest and greatest in play-to-earn and blockchain gaming. Venture to the forefront of crypto innovation and connect with OKX DeFi today. Again, go check them out at OKX. That's where you can find OKX DeFi. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular

investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right ladies and gentlemen i got a very special treat for you guys today we have ryan radloff who's here and uh i want to go through first before we get started you guys bought kingdom trust merged merged yep which is the owner of choice yep and choice is what i use for my retirement so let's get that out of the way yeah uh we've worked together for quite a while now uh i'm a big believer in alternative assets as most people have uh astutely figured out yeah and choice itself is not just bitcoin it's basically alternative assets in general, you allow them to put that into retirement accounts.

Is that a fair characterization? That's right. But except the difference is they let a Bitcoiner run the company. So we've got, you know, we've got 20 billion in assets, except they have a Bitcoiner at the helm. All right. So, you know, there's, there's one thing where I'm really focused on advancing as Bitcoin, but yes, I don't believe, you know, as we're seeing the Bitcoin community advance and becoming a more financial literate, you're seeing other things happen, but Bitcoin is the nucleus of what we're doing okay so let's talk about the retirement problem in America first uh it's atrocious like when people start unpacking the numbers it's literally pathetic yeah um and I don't remember exact data but basically the average person at retirement age has about

$200,000 it's less than that actually less okay what is it you probably know you tell me well if you're over 50 you have less than 200,000 bucks right so you're sitting there at the end of your career and you're wondering what's next and $200,000 especially inflation adjustment is what it's it's not much right so if you live on twenty thousand dollars a year and you retire at 62 you don't even make it to the life expectancy of somebody in the united states and the good news on the health front is we're getting longer and longer lives right but your financial life is getting shorter and shorter it feels like yeah and you know so it's you're over 50 you don't have enough if you're under 30 you probably have nothing is what the data shows so this is a big

issue and not only under 30 you have nothing over 50 you basically have 200 or less and uh when people actually get to retirement age do we know what the number is in terms of like the average amount it's got to be what 200 200 ish right around there yeah yeah and so basically 59 and a half is what is what we define as like the retirement age okay at least we can start withdrawing from iras okay so at 200 000 again if we just do simple math if you spend 50 000 a year uh you make it four years yeah four years if you spend 20 000 a year with no other income then you basically get a decade so you make it to 70 average uh life expectancy 77 78 79 and so you don't even make it to the end of your life with the money you have let alone if you want to pass

money on to your kids family members friends etc right and you have some social security out there that is obviously let's not get too uh negative but it's completely bankrupt so you know you have not only this understated they say they say look they're gonna run out of money by like 2034 or something right well they look we're done yeah exactly so you have an you have a population here in the u.s that's that's current account is is is too low and you have a completely bankrupt social security system and yeah it's a crisis whether we want to admit it or not it is so that's it's a big deal the thing with the social security that we've talked about numerous times is uh who was the two guys i think ken langone was one of them and uh there was another guy on cnbc basically

was telling like uh some of the politicians uh elizabeth warren that uh yo i'm a billionaire why am i getting a social security check like like this makes no sense here right and uh also they were saying something about pandemic checks as well right but the idea that we basically just give everyone the money rather than the people who need it. Right. Just seems like such a government bureaucratic thing to do that obviously is wasting money in many ways. It is. And you know, this is the, this is the fight that we're fighting though. So we're here as a country and we got to figure out a way. Yeah. So when you think about today, let's, let's take people under the age of 40, maybe, right. What is like the path from a retirement standpoint in terms of what they

should be doing, right? Not necessarily what assets they should buy, but like, how do they actually think about retirement and what they can do on a day-to-day basis to put them in a better position so that they actually have money at retirement age. You know, it depends. So like the thing I got to wrap all this as you guys do a great job of, I don't give financial advice, but the, the, the deal is what, what happens with when you have retirement savings is it enables you to take more risks in your career. So what, what we see right now is that people put too much into non-qualified or non IRA money. They don't really think about that post 59 phase. And what that does is it gives them a shorter lease of what, of what to do over the next like 15, 20 years.

So, you know in terms of the irs allows for a six thousand dollar a year ira contribution much more than that in the 401k standpoint But yeah, we don't see enough people putting more money away and that's really the problem I think the bigger issue is that the ira companies and like the legacy guard it's broken It's like have you guys ever you guys have worked at a few places before running this media empire that you've got What happens is it's so boring. It is so terrible like like rolling something over from a vanguard or the old guard it's it's it's awful it's like going to get in colonoscopy if you will so you know nobody wants to do it so what's even worse about that is you've got a trillion dollars and you guys covered this about a month or two ago you have a trillion dollars think about that number for a second

of savings that is completely forgotten about no one is even looking at it it's exists and what the what the managers are doing is they're just eating fees every year like clipping those tickets they're stealing. They're just, I said it. Okay. You said stealing. I agree with you. I'm not going to say it outright, but it is, it's ridiculous. And it's because of this like boring, crusty nature of like how savings are looked at. And you know, I it's, it's sad because what that does is again, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're trying to get a new job, if you're not thinking, if you don't balance that like long-term view versus short-term savings, it shortens that leash on what you can do and risks you can take in your career, which puts you in a worse financial

position i forget the analysis that i saw but a lot of these um kind of managed retirement accounts basically they go into assets that uh one don't have great financial performance no two is there's uh either um egregious fees or higher fees than you would get in like a low cost index uh and then third thing is that over a long period of time when you add up all the compounding like the difference of if you just bought the s&p 500 in a low cost index fund versus one of these things, it like, it's very egregious. And so not only are people not aware of where their assets are, what they're invested in, what fees they're paying, but actually, even if they don't know any of that stuff at the end, they get screwed, right? They just don't have the amount of money that they

need there. And so how do you guys think about like educating people and like, go find where your retirement money is and where, where the hell it's invested? Well, the old guard, like the old retirement guys wants you to have this phase, like set it and forget it. Right. And that's what leads to what you're talking about. It's set it and forget it. And it's like, I'm in some time-dated mutual funds that expire in 2040, 50, 60, 70. And what's going on is these, the front end, back end fee loads are just destroying you. Even if you get your inflation adjusted three or 4% a year, they're taking their 20%, no problem. So what we're promoting is engaging, just engage with it. We have a program where we can go find your old 401k or IRA from the company you left,

go find it and actually do something with it. You know, especially, you know, the people we're talking to are the Bitcoiners. I mean, there's 15.2 million Bitcoiners today in the US that are stacking sats every day. They're thinking of ways to advance themselves, but they've got some IRA sitting over at like Vanguard or somewhere else that they're doing nothing with. That probably has somewhere between 30 to 50,000. So that's the calling right now. It's like, let's not set it and forget it. Let's engage. We're not our parents and our grandparents. Times have changed. The Fed is changing the game right under our feet. And we can't just sit there and expect that Wall Street is going to take care of us. It's not going to happen. So again, we don't give advice. We want

you to engage. We don't want you to sit there and let Wall Street eat your savings away. We want you to reach out, engage in your savings, and start figuring out what's best for you. And structurally, we believe that Bitcoin, this is personal, not necessarily financial advice, we believe Bitcoin is the best long-term savings technology that's ever been invented, bar none. I agree. So what we're aiming to do first and foremost submission is first, we want to advance Bitcoin, right? So that's number one. I wake up every day to advance Bitcoin. The second is I want to make savings fun. I don't think we can solve this issue unless we make this thing really fun. And, you know, I've seen what I'm actually pissed about is I've seen too much of our movement get hijacked by this

by this movement of let's, let's push the newest coin down our user's throat and let them day trade their wealth away. That's not what this is about. Let's, let's build wealth into the best savings technology for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Not just sit there and look at the newest coin that comes out and hope that it's going to go up. This is about, it's about discipline. And I think that's the most important thing. I completely agree. I've got a, a choice account as I described. I think that john you've got one right i got one as well yeah and joe is in the process of moving it but uh as joe has on joe no no as joe has went to move it and john went through this as well so did i is it is incredibly difficult it's like trying to cancel a cable subscription oh it's ridiculous i

mean you call and they're like oh sorry i'll transfer you uh departments right they're like oh set an email here bounce right like it's just every single step of the way they make it incredibly hard to actually get the money out how do you guys think about like reducing that friction. Even the people who say like, Hey, I want to move it out of X account. And I love this idea. I want to actually get Bitcoin exposure in my retirement account. Like, are there things that you guys do or can do to actually reduce the friction so that people don't have to go bang their head against the wall? Yeah. So the first thing we did, I mean, we noticed this when we launched it like two years ago, we were like, okay, we expect Bitcoiners to move and be excited

and we're getting that cohort. But then all of a sudden it pump, as you mentioned, it is tough. It's an old crusty environment and they don't want you to leave that money and they don't want you to give up those fees. So what we've done is we built a whole concierge service that walks you through that, navigates you through that and makes it easier. So that's really, it's, it's still not like necessarily some overnight, like flip the switch thing. It requires talking to someone in a concierge to build out the right forms and navigate through. So it's like the DMV, but we have a concierge helper to navigate through that DMV, the old crusty system. And you know, that's the price it takes to get into something that's scarce. You know, there's nothing else like that

that exists in the legacy side. So that's, that's our answer for that. But more importantly, I think, you know, we'll talk about getting people excited about this is more important to me than anything else. Like it is in gamifying savings in the same way that what our industry has tried to do, which is gamified trading, which I don't agree with. So once somebody gets a choice account, you basically have a couple of different ways to get exposure, right? You can go the route of publicly traded funds or trusts like GBTC, et cetera, which you can buy other stocks, et cetera, in this account, or you can actually buy Bitcoin directly and hold your private keys. Talk us through kind of both of those exposure options from somebody who opens the retirement

account and actually wants to get Bitcoin exposure. So choice kind of at our core is we don't, I don't want to tell you what to do with your funds. I mean, obviously you guys know I'm a Bitcoiner. I'm trying to advance that. It's a nucleus of our mission, but how you get Bitcoin is up to you. You've got the option of going through, you can do any ETF or stock in your choice account or the top, you know, Bitcoin and the top 20 cryptos. I view those as two separate things. So you can buy the physical and you can either have that in a free account. You can park that at Fidelity Digital, which is the most, one of the most institutional grade, or you can, as you said, hold your own keys. You get the choice, kind of the name of what to do. And that covers

the full gauntlet. We have our full libertarian core in our community, as you guys know, that if it's not your keys, not your coins. We want to make sure that we nail that. I want to bring people down the rabbit hole as they're going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole of understanding the importance of doing that. Like personally, the nucleus of mine, I have 70% of my IRA where I hold my own keys. I have a little bit with Fidelity and I have a little bit that's out there earning interest. That's like a balance. So when I think of diversification for me, it's not necessarily about, do I have the right debt to fixed income and crypto? It's like, how is my Bitcoin structured? I have Bitcoin that's in my, I call it a libertarian stack,

that's in my multi-sig spread across the country, that's in my IRA. I have some that's parked at Fidelity Digital because I trust that gang. I think they're doing an amazing job. And then I have some that where I'm out there earning interest and in the worlds of the interest bearing Bitcoin. That's the smallest amount, by the way, but it doesn't mean that I don't participate. So for me, what that means is we, it covers the gauntlet, but I think Bitcoin CEOs have an obligation to move people towards that hold your own key model. I think that as your users are going down the rabbit hole and learning about our space, the end goal needs to be that you have your nucleus sitting there in multi-sig or in some, you know, hold your own keys methodology.

And I think that is anyone not doing that has got some casino trading goal in mind, which is what I'm saying has been hijacked. A part of our movement's been hijacked from. So it's really a big deal. And, and I, and that's what we're focused on doing over the next 20 years with our customers. And when you start to think about people who do this, are you seeing this from the Bitcoin community? Are you seeing non Bitcoiners go ahead and open an account and also learn about this and kind of get exposure? Like, like where are people coming from? I mean, we, because it may be because of like the temperature that I'm setting and the bar that I'm setting, but we're, we're Bitcoin focused. I view Bitcoin and crypto as like, I'm happy that crypto exists. I think

it's fascinating what's going on in NFTs and the rest of the world. I think you need this kind of Darwinism natural selection to compete. But what we're structurally advancing is Bitcoin. And if our users want to expand that beyond Bitcoin into other crypto and other stocks, we're all for that, which is why we offer 20,000 different assets. Bitcoin is the most we're seeing. In fact, I got a stat for you. This morning, today, 70% of our volumes, John, what do you think it is? Buy or sell of Bitcoin? Buy. Buy. 70% buy of our user base. We have 20,000 users and it's grown by 5,000 a month. Those are people that aren't tourists. Those are people that have conviction, that are here for, I'm graduating with them over the next 20 years. They're not

sitting there day trading for the next three or five. These are long dated IRAs. That tells you something. These people are not here just to go in and out hoping that they get rich quick. This is a 30 year structural view. When on days like this, we buy. When people put other assets, so non-Bitcoin, the one example I always use is fire trucks, right? Like explain some of the other stuff that people have put into these accounts. A lot of real estate, actually. We've got 400 million of gold, which I think is, you know, I was always a big gold bug, still have gold, but we have fire trucks, real estate, physical hard assets. We're seeing a lot of people that we do have a bit, about a billion of stocks too, which, you know, again, I own stocks. I'm not

going to not own stocks. I have a financial advisor that I disagree with basically everything on. I want him to do stuff that I don't, that I don't believe in almost as a diversification strategy, but we have some really cool stuff. I, you know, and, and a lot of niche opportunities where you can build that Bitcoin as your nucleus, have some stock exposure, but also not lose rental income in your IRA. That sounds like ridiculous to say, but yeah, all of those 20,000 assets, Bitcoin being the nucleus though, you know, and I think that's the user base that we're building over the next 20 years for is a, like a financially switched on Bitcoiner. Cause we're, we're growing up, you know, it's not, we have, we have wealth obviously a little less today than

maybe three days ago, but we've got, it's now about having that as a nucleus and how does Bitcoin interacts with kind of the rest of your portfolio. And I think that's, what's really cool to see. And, and that's what they're demanding. How does the custody work on choice? Like not only from where it's actually being held, but the fees associated with it. So you either have a free version, you can park it at fidelity. Uh, so the free version we take care of as kingdom, you park it at fidelity, which shouldn't be cheap. Again, I'm one of those people that I think that air gap cold storage is not necessarily a race to the bottom per se all the time. You know, GBTC charges 2%. We charge half of that to put it at, I think the most institutional

group in the, in the market, which is Fidelity. And then you can hold your own keys, right? So it's all three of those options. And as I said, like, as you go down that rabbit hole, as your stack gets bigger and bigger, you know, moving bulks of that towards a multi-sig helps balance that. When you think about, uh, how people can buy Bitcoin and pay no taxes on that, like explain how that works according to the current tax code. So what the IRS has built, this is back 30, 40 years ago, is they built what's called a qualified wrapper. Think of it as like a brokerage or a Coinbase account that has this wrapper around it that enables you to not pay short-term capital gains. So when you trade on Coinbase or any of these other exchanges, you have the

situation where you're paying income tax, basically, if you're trading within a year. When you're in an IRA or a qualified wrapper, that doesn't exist. You can trade your heart away until you're old, fat, and gray. And you don't pay capital gains on that until way, way, way later. And then you pay a total tax on income once you take it out. So the IRS has built this for us. It's built for hodlers. It's amazing. So it's not just trading, but hodling. You can accumulate, and you don't see any taxes until you're old. And if it's a Roth IRA, you don't see any taxes ever. And so we're seeing a nucleus of our cohort of users that are putting dollars into Bitcoin in a Roth IRA. And then when they are, when they graduate to that 59 and a half age, they never

have to pay taxes on that again. They're living in a Bitcoin circular economy at that point. And they're starting to think, think about that where Bitcoin is the actual currency that they're looking at using. So when I basically have post-tax dollars and I use a Roth IRA, I put those post-tax dollars into my retirement account i can buy bitcoin and regardless if i think i'm a genius day trader or i want to just hold at age 59 and a half i can begin to take that stuff out and pay no taxes exactly exactly also seek your own tax advice but that's the way that the written rules are work right now and then in terms of if i don't use a roth ira if i go ahead and i put dollars into my retirement account i trade no taxes and then the only time i would ever pay taxes in that

scenario is at 59 and a half when i go to take it out i basically pay taxes at the very end whatever the amount is that I'm taking out. Bingo. And by that point, what we see in the U S retirement system and like Americans is that you're typically working a little less. Your, your, your like salary will go down. So your total income tax will go down. Hopefully we'll see. But, but that's the point is you're building our users. Aren't like, I don't think when I think of choice, we're third. So you typically don't buy Bitcoin for the first time in your IRA. You typically go down the rabbit hole with GBTC or Coinbase or Kraken or one of these others. You then go, you then learn about it. And then you realize, oh, there's 30, 100,000 bucks sitting in this thing over here that I

haven't looked at for years. We want to be second and third. It's a third stack, right? So if you're out there stacking sats every day, this is not necessarily the primary way you got in, but now it's the completion of your financial picture of where you've got Bitcoin exposure in that qualified capacity, which is big. Can people actually contribute Bitcoin into their retirement or do they contribute dollars first? I'm lobbying on that right now. So right now, the way that the IRS has written this is that you got to do dollars. But here's the good news about that. So to be clear, you have to go dollars into retirement account. You can't go Bitcoin from your Coinbase or whatever account into your retirement. Right. But on a stock to flow model, that's really good

because what we're seeing is net fresh new dollars coming in and buying Bitcoin. So that's it's a positive thing, especially for me as a Bitcoin that's trying to advance the space. I'm looking at a month we're getting between 30 to 100 million dollars a month coming in from the legacy retirement system in dollars and it's going into Bitcoin. And to me, that gets me super excited because I know that that's 20, 30, 40 year capital from the average Bitcoiner. Who's like 30 something years old, had a few jobs, et cetera. That's quality. Are most people trading inside of their retirement accounts or are they just buying assets and holding them for a long period of time? Two cohorts, you know, the guys and gals that are holding your own keys, they're not

trading. They're, they're, they're here. They're here for the long run. The ones that are holding at Fidelity Digital. They're long-term people. You do see, I trade a little bit. I've traded some in the last few days. You do see some cohort that are doing it because they don't have to pay that short-term capital gains issue that they're getting in all their crypto exchanges. That's good. I don't necessarily fault that. But again, what our mission is trying to do is I don't want you day trading your wealth away, right? Even if you may have the ability to do that, and that's great. Not all of our users do. I want you building wealth every day. And that's a big reason why we've actually, you know, if you think about our second mission, that's a big reason for

what we've done with something called Blinko. We've created this game that literally gives you Bitcoin if you play it every day and puts a little bit in your pocket towards that long-term savings. So we want people that are thinking about it in a long-term. John, you had a good text this morning in light, especially what's going on. Most of our users that are coming to the market and are coming to us right now aren't thinking about how do I accumulate Bitcoin so that I can be rich in two to three years. They're thinking about how do I accumulate Bitcoins to diversify my long-term wealth over the next 30 years. That's the user we want. And that's who we're getting. And that's the Bitcoiner, really, if you think about it. Most of us, as you know,

Anthony, we're not here for a quick in and out. This is a long-term structural thing where I'm building a better financial future for my son for our kids not necessarily just get in and out so that i can go to the beach and and hang out more and for joe's dog ranger yeah exactly yeah john rangers included for sure yeah yeah can you talk about that gamification aspect of it because i think that's really important for less friction and um more like mass adoption when people know that they can actually earn bitcoin that way for sure so what so here's it sounds ridiculous and i've actually got some legacy retirement people that are pissed at us for doing this which i which makes me happy. Good. Yeah. So what we do is we've created a game. It's called Blinko. Blinko pays

you in Bitcoin every day. If you download the app right now, the first thing we enable you to do is play Blinko. It was inspired by the old Price is Right Blinko thing, where you drop a pin and it hits all of the little pins and it falls down into a box. So you play every day, once a day, and you get free sats. Right now, what we do is you have either like anywhere between a couple dollars to a few cents every day. And what that does is it gamifies the behavior of savings. One of the things that I'm pissed about is that, and when I say like our industry has been hijacked, I think a lot of the biggest crypto companies have built their model around getting their users to day trade and gamify trading. Robinhood's done a great job. They gamified trading. Oh,

you got her up right now. Are you playing? I got Blinko right now, right here on my actual screen itself so what he's about to do he's going to drop this chip and that's our contribution to your long-term savings every day he's going to get between 500s to 50 sats right now let's go let's go let's go oh zero sats that's bullshit i'll talk to my guys to be in reset but seriously we're but you can wait no you can win 100 sats Absolutely. And we do bonuses every Friday. Friday, 4X, 5X, that's our big deal. So look, every pin drop, we're getting like, I want 100 million people playing this game. Because think about what that's doing. Right now, what we just talked about, if you're 30 and under,

you have no savings. If you're 50 and over, you have not enough savings. Every time you play that game, it's a silly game in an IRA. We're one step closer to solving the US social security crisis. It may sound like a game, but here's the deal. My peers are putting $250 million to put their name on an arena. I want to put $250 million in the next few years in the U.S. Social Security and retirement system right now. Ready? We're going to play again. I just reset it myself because I'm a genius.

Oh, you're okay. There we go. Drop the chip. Oh, I really hope you win this time, man. Yeah, me too. I'm going to talk about... It's trending towards the middle. Oh, yeah. No!

Wait, you got it? No, zero. Jeez. that means that everyone else who plays today is likely to win because i just took out two of the two of the zeros i'll tell you what because of that i i'm gonna talk about marketing guys when i walk out of the studio i'm gonna try to put some type of some type of accelerator today over the next day or two we're gonna accelerate all right so when people get this basically the entire idea is just like savings in general sucks right and then there is the the ability to

play the game yep uh and you can earn again it's not incredible amounts but you're not gonna win $500 or anything, but you can win sats every single day. And as it adds up plus the accelerator, it could become a material amount of money. And then over a long period of time, as the purchasing power of that asset increases, right? That's where all of a sudden the long-term thinking really is an advantage. But what I think is really important people to understand is like your retirement account is a savings account. And I think that people don't understand. It's just a tax advantage savings account. So talk a little bit about how you think about the saving crisis and then like why retirement accounts are such a big part of the solution there.

Well, I think you're exactly right. Like that builds up every day. We want you and it's not just about the rewards you're winning every day on Blinko. It's about being engaged and switching on to savings. And when you have that, the balance between having something for retirement set aside versus what you can do through ages 35 to 59 and a half is massive. When you have a chunk sitting there in your IRA and your long-term savings, that enables you from a cash flow standpoint to put that towards taking risks, right? And I think that's the balance that we don't have anymore in the U.S. You know, our parents and grandparents would put everything in their IRAs and be what's called cash poor. There's kind of been this swap of what's happened as the millennial generation has gone from Wall Street to Main Street. We've gone everything into brokerage accounts and all of a sudden forgot about IRAs and retirement accounts. There's a balance that needs to happen. We need to have a balance of long-term structural savings that gives us the ability to take

more risks in career and be entrepreneurs, go get a new job. These things matter. And having it, you know, the reason why we're giving Bitcoin out, again, not financial advice, but we do believe Sats every day is the best financial savings technology that exists. And that doing a hundred, I want a hundred million people playing that in the next few years. If we can get that to that level, we have a chance at solving the US social security crisis and the savings crisis that exists right now that you guys have talked about for a lot in

the last few months. People are already tweeting at, uh, at the choice corporate account and they're like, yo dude, he didn't win. And their response is he's saving the wins for you guys. I'll talk to my boys and see if the gang and see if we can get a, uh, some type of big promotion because of that. Okay. So one of the promotions that you guys do have coming up is between now and tax day, which, uh, the, uh, the first tax day of the year is, uh, is I think the 18th of, uh, of April this year. Uh, as I always joke, rich people know that the tax day is actually October 15th. Right. Yeah. They figured it out. But, uh, but April 18th, this year's tax day, you guys are going to give away 1 billion Satoshis. How are you guys thinking about doing this? Why are you giving away a

billion Satoshis before a tax day? Well, it's back to this, this mission. I mean, we want to advance Bitcoin in the U S retirement system into the 15.2 million Bitcoiners that already own Bitcoin and have some zombie account out there, but aren't yet thinking about it. And I look, My goal the next three to five years is I want to do much, much, much more than that. I want to give away hundreds of billions of sats into the U.S. system. Where you see my peers that are doing big stadium rebrands, I want that going back into the U.S. savings systems, back into the retirement system. So, yes, between now and April 15th, we're announcing we're going to do a billion sats. I'm actually going to try to do much more than that.

I'm going to talk to the VCs and my CFO and see what I can do. But, yeah, that's it. It's all back on that mission of advancing Bitcoin and solving the U.S. savings crisis and making it fun. Without making it fun, we're not going to get there. We've tried it multiple times. You've got to have fun to it. What questions do you guys got about retirement and Bitcoin exposure? Yeah, just like how has this conversation changed over time, right?

Like I'm assuming a few years ago this was not normal. People were confused and curious as to why they should do this, especially non-Bitcoiners, right? So talk me through just like how that conversation has changed. Well, I think what's changed is the Bitcoiners got more sophisticated. I think what's changed is the Bitcoiners getting older, the Bitcoiners accumulating wealth. And now they're starting to think about not just my, you know, multi-sig stack, but how does Bitcoin integrate with the rest of my financial picture? How does it integrate with my retirement savings? How does it integrate with my mortgages? How does it, how do I get Bitcoin back dollar loans? This isn't just an IRA conversation. This is a big percentage of Americans that are becoming more financially savvy that have questions about how these two worlds integrate. And you know what they're pissed about is they're tired of listening to the old guard that's telling them, oh, Bitcoin's not suitable for anything related with mortgages, anything

related with IRAs. And we're tired of it. We're sick of it. We've heard your old guard talk about it for way too long. We've watched our savings go to zero with your inflation. And we're tired. We're opting out. We're going plan B.

so what's changed is us i think we are no longer some you know little niche community of financial investors we are now a big community in the united states that is sick of this old guard telling us what to do with it i think that's the biggest thing john for sure when you think about just retirement account in general obviously you guys offer bitcoin and to be honest when i got my choice now it was super easy to set up it was it took me maybe two minutes to do which was absolutely amazing because a lot of products are really, really hard. How do you think about the different exposure between Bitcoin and other assets in your Roth IRA or any retirement account? I think, again, so Choice, we want to empower you to make those decisions. I think the type

of user we're seeing is that Bitcoin is typically the nucleus of their financial life. Then what they do is they think about, OK, what's the correct? So if I'm looking at the world from a Bitcoin lens out, which, by the way, in the next few months or year, I want a full sats version of all of your assets. But I think there's what we're seeing in our users, for instance, is a balance of about 20 to 30% stocks, 20 to 30% alternatives in the nucleus of it being in Bitcoin. And they'll, they'll also dabble in some of the newer coins, which I think is as interesting. And I don't necessarily run away from, I just think that's a, like I said, there's a natural selection component of that. What we're seeing though, in our users at Bitcoin is a

nucleus. And that's like, that's, and it's not just about diversification of the type of asset. there's also what's key. And what we're learning is the diversification of how you hold your Bitcoin. You shouldn't just have it all with some custodian. You need a balance between multi-sig, having it parked at a trusted custodian, and also out there earning interest in some of the capital markets. Because the capital markets layer around Bitcoin is getting more mature. This is not a bad thing for Bitcoin, especially when your nucleus is sitting in a air-gapped or multi-sig situation. So I think that's the biggest thing. What are the downsides to putting Bitcoin

in your retirement account? Obviously, there's price volatility, but if you have a long enough time period, are there other things that you guys think about as like the risks or downsides people should be aware of? Well, if you don't believe in Bitcoin, you know, it's volatile. All right, look at us today.

Most of our users look at it as this is a buying day. That's why those volumes are what they are. The other thing is that there's a penalty. Because you don't have to pay taxes, the other side of that is there's a penalty if you withdraw those funds before you're 59 and a half right so the so this is these save these are long-term savings accounts that are structured for you to save for the future and the irs wants you instead of paying those taxes every year they want you uh they're going to penalize you if you if you make gains and then withdraw it so i that's

why there's a balance you shouldn't go everything into your ira again not financial advice but it has a purpose because as i said it enables you and unlocks you to do other things with your non-qualified non-ira dollars to advance yourself to advance your career and that's that's that's why it's a healthy thing uh but i would say that distribution penalty is probably the biggest thing it's 10 plus taxes got it and then mostly when you think about uh in terms of um retirement in general obviously there are uh maybe legal or kind of regulatory limits in terms of how much you can put in there. What are some of the ways that people are able to get more money in, right? I know there's things like SEP IRAs, et cetera, like talk through just kind of what you see most

people doing to try to actually be able to use the tax law, which is available to everyone. One of the big themes of this show is look, billionaires, they just have a lot of resources for people to go figure this stuff out, right? So they have an advantage in that sense, but the tax law or tax code is available for everyone to use equally. It's not like you get a different tax code than me. It's just, you got to understand how it works. So how do you guys see people trying to get more money in their retirement. Well, you have this whole self-employed, uh, qualified accounts, which is big. And that gives you much more than the six to 20,000. You can go as high as 60, you know, way up there in terms of the amount. Um, before I say any of this, you seek

your own tax advice. The other thing is, I don't know shit about taxes. So make sure you go find an actual lawyer. Yeah. Well, I know about, but I'm not, you know, it's more of a license. The other thing is health savings accounts. So, so that's a fun, that's, that's a new one that most people you can, if you have a health savings account from your employer, you can, There's companies out there, we're close to offering it, where you can actually put your Bitcoin in health savings accounts. So there's opportunities, especially if you're self-employed to do much, much more. Again, what I think more importantly is a balance of like where you are in terms of your discretionary savings. So every month, whatever amount you're putting in,

make sure you're thinking about which ones, what amount of my savings I put in tax qualified, long-term savings that protect me from those taxes, as opposed to just sending it to wherever you are, your brokerage account, your, your, your crypto exchange, your Robinhood account, et cetera. There's a balance there you need to be thinking of. And again, that, that gives you more of a holistic financial picture of your long-term savings. Got it. And then when you think about people inside of the account, I think one of the parts to me that's so fascinating is like you have to hear stories of the peter teals etc they put equities and things like that yeah really what you're talking about here is this is a liquid traded asset right there's a mark to market

on a daily basis hourly basis whatever um does that change the way that any of the tax treatment occurs or how people think about their retirement versus let's say like a private stock uh like in his case no you know what the irs actually does to come up a level what the irs does is they actually just tell you what you can't do you can pretty much do uh whatever you want except for a few things. And those things are like collectibles. So the NFT world, it's really under siege right now, whether it can go into an IRA. We don't do any of that yet. The other thing that's is called self-dealing. So you can't just buy a house and say, you know what? I want tomorrow to put that house into an IRA. It's called self-dealing. So whether it's a, to answer your question,

whether it's like a liquid security or a liquid, something liquid like Bitcoin, which isn't a security yet or isn't, should be ever, that doesn't really matter. What the IRS does is they actually tell you what you can't do. And then there's rules around the reporting around that. So that's been the boom of our industry is Bitcoin penetrating the multi-trillion dollar IRA market and retirement market. So it's more structured in that way of what you can't do in those few things. Whether it's liquid or not, it doesn't matter as much. Yeah. It's fascinating, the idea of liquidity, right? Obviously during market drawdowns, there's like, I'm so glad that I have liquidity. Obviously we know that liquidity can be a feature or a bug or depending on how you react in certain

situations. But one of the things is when you put money into the retirement account, obviously you quote unquote, can't get it out. Now that's not exactly true. So what happens if somebody puts money into a retirement account, emergency scenario, you know, break glass type situation, what is the penalty in terms of actually pulling that stuff out? Usually it's 10% plus you pay your income tax. That's it. So, so you've got, you've got a, usually. All right. So you've got a, that's it. And, and, you know, again, if, if a lot of our accounts are looking at several hundred percent gains, and it's been one of those things where they've got that, if they have to have it, they can pull it out. If, if not, then what the IRS

has built that structure for you to long-term and save without paying the taxes. So it's not the end of the world, especially when you've been a long-term choice, a hodler, but it is, it's, it's, it's approachable. It is an ideal, right? So you want to think of your IRA as like the last pool of capital that you need to pull from. It's not your emergency funds. Again, this is your long-term thinking. And quite frankly, that's also why there's a crisis because it's, you know, people like myself, I, you know, was lazy through my twenties and didn't do it enough. I wish I had done it more. I'm catching up now. And part of the reason is because A, it's stale and crusty as the old, the old guard. And B, there was that kind of thought of, well, I need this

money and, you know, I need it today. Potentially could need it tomorrow. And so there's a balance there. I think that you want to have a couple of different stacks of your Bitcoin. You want to have your multi-sig, what I call libertarian stack, and not everyone calls it that. You want to have some in the market where you're liquid and ready to trade if you want. And then you want to have some that's sitting in your third stack that you're thinking about 30, 40, 50 years in a tax qualified capacity where those short-term taxes aren't applicable. And by the way, Pomp, as you No, taxes, structurally, on a macro basis, they look like they're going up.

Yes. So this topic is going to get more and more popular in our generation with Bitcoiners over the next 10 to 15 years. So I got a couple of questions from the audience, and then we'll wrap up. But you don't know this, but our audience is so incredibly smart

that somebody asked Brendan Bolling, said, how did taxes work on the sats you win through the Blinko game? Since they were gifted to your account and you didn't purchase them with your own post-tax USD. So how about that? Hey, so what's going on? Two things.

So those are contributions, right? So it's like you put, so we're actually, what we're doing is we're contributing dollars that we're then buying the Bitcoin for you inside your IRA, right? So that's our way of getting sats into your IRA. It has to go in through dollars. So those are just contributions.

And what we've enabled now in the app is you can either, if you're winning every day for the next like 20, 30, 40 days or the next few months, you can choose to contribute them this year or you can hold and contribute them next year. They're still yours. So that's the beauty of it. If you've already maxed out your IRA,

like done the annual contribution limits and you're winning sats and blanco every day, you can hold that and say, you know what, Choice, I'm gonna contribute that Jan 1st or April, May 1st of next year so that it doesn't mess up my contribution limits this year. So think of it as just new contribution dollars.

It's us, where your employer is matching for your 401k, choice is matching for you every day in a game for your IRA. So you can choose whether you do it this year or next year. Got it. And then what about minimums? Do I have to have a certain amount of money to open a retirement account? Zero. Zero. You can get started. That's the big deal here is that you can start playing Blinko with no savings every day and start building. And you don't have to have any dollars in your choice account to start earning Bitcoin and winning Bitcoin every day. That's why this is important because especially under 30 years old where you've got zero in an IRA. I'm tired of that. Let's solve that. If we can build and give you 10,

20, 30 bucks of Bitcoin by playing Blink over the next three years, and then once you get a job that you're happy with, you can put more in, that's what I want. Because in 20 to 30 years, that's what's going to solve this savings crisis. It's not sitting there like the old guard is done and said, you have to have a $1,500, $2,000 minimum to even pay to play. What we're doing is the opposite. Because of Bitcoin and Lightning and everything else, we can now deposit pennies or sats into your IRA just to get started, right? And that's a big deal. You can't do that in the legacy system. Yeah. It feels like once you understand what the incentives are, both from a taxation standpoint and kind of the long-term devaluation of a currency, something like Bitcoin

in a retirement account becomes pretty obvious. It doesn't mean you've got to put 100% of your retirement account in there. It doesn't mean that you have to only do that. But it definitely feels like, uh, people just, okay. And once I understand the problem, this becomes a pretty obvious solution. Well, what you're doing, what's so fascinating is like, you know, I'm partial obviously as a CEO choice, but I think that Bitcoin is the greatest saving technology of all time. And I think that retirement accounts are the greatest savings accounts of all time. You combine those two and add a game to it. And that's, that's right up my alley. Nothing gets me more excited than that. So Bitcoin's built in my opinion for long-term savings accounts, especially

our users and the bitcoiners that aren't just here in and out day to day so uh in part of my retirement account i have gbtc yeah and i've been taking an absolute bath on it but my my uh message is like i'm you know i'm only 33 i got like another 30 years to go like i can definitely outlast the fucking discount absolutely right they gotta at some point close that close that gap like let's go baby you want to see who can hold on longer the discount or me Like I like my odds given the, uh, the tax treatment agreed. And you know, personal, personal view on that is I don't think, I think the sec is going to convert that thing. I don't at some point at some point. And when it does, they're going to create some, uh, ETF that is

credible and redeemable. And that nav, the discount, again, not financial advice again, but that nav is going to, is going to close in. You can't, if you're the sec, it does take some coordination with the IRS right now, because you've got some situation where you're converting a security and a prospectus into an etf structure as opposed to that trust structure that we've got i i own gbtc in my choice account too i know that my my guys might not be excited i say that i have for years i think it's going to close in yeah well and i think also part of it is um for the longest time that was the only way to get bitcoin exposure now obviously with what you guys have now i can actually buy bitcoin hold my private keys or build the custodian etc so i think there's

a whole bunch of people who just from a legacy standpoint they just had it right and it was you felt like a genius when you figured out that you could even get exposure and then obviously it was in a vehicle that uh you know and again it's nothing that the grayscale team did actually think the grayscale team is uh uh if they could wave a magic wand they'd convert it today right agreed yeah they absolutely want to get that back to nav and and they're for a whole bunch of reasons um but now there's an option obviously to also just go ahead and buy uh but by the bitcoin itself and that's one of our biggest drivers are people convert rotating out of gbc into the physical you know oh really oh yeah absolutely because they're tired of it and and you know we

don't know how long that premiums or the discount rather is going to last so you know the opportunity to get into physical now is is one of the biggest drivers especially as they're staring down that uh and bear markets that that that discount seems to deepen uh but i agree the grayscale guys have and gals there have done a great job it's not it's they aren't responsible for that it's quite frankly, in my opinion, it's the regulators. That is on their hands, that they can approve this anytime they want and structure that into an ETF and this problem goes away. And you have a bunch of US citizens that are in a great spot. They're allowing this discrepancy and this discount to exist right now. And quite frankly, it's shameful. It pisses me off. There's a lot of people that

want bitcoin exposure in a regulated capacity and the sec is looking at this and saying no not right now we want you to continue going down this discount road when it's completely in their power to coordinate with the irs and fix this today the gbtc discount right now uh is that like 36 percent just stop it is that that's probably down today it's it i've noticed it typically was like 20 or so like friday yeah something like that well again like this is there's no excuse significantly you've got that barry and gang and michael they're running as high quality shop that exists fully you know fully buttoned up like let's go we can solve this right now and help american consumers like if like this there's millions of people that own that thing

well they've been doing it what for seven years eight years now right they obviously have spent a ton of time energy money uh resources on making sure they were regulated making sure that they were doing everything right making sure that it was a clear vehicle making sure that people could get the best exposure possible every time the regulator said oh there's manipulation in the market there's prices issues there's data issues whatever they've gone and they've tried to fix those issues and come back and say hey look we fixed it here's how we did it you know what do you think uh they've tried to have an open collaborative conversation and yet here we are with literally uh an asset that you know has got a double digit discount to nav and it's a structural

issue more so than anything else you know one of the things though when i talked to like i heard Novogratz say this one time, the closed, even though GBTC is not structured legally as a closed-ended, closed-ended markets of closed-ended trusts do trade at a discount. So it's not what I think in defense of the SEC may be, or the regulators rather, without calling out any one particular group, is that it is standard for a structural deficiency that doesn't have a creation or redemption clause in it to trade at a discount. And that's very technical ETF words, but I do think we're going to see a change to this at some point. And it's going to be positive for U.S. citizens,

and it's going to be positive for Bitcoin. So it looks like we just got word that the thing that you can earn in Blinko, the reward, I guess it is, just got drastically increased. What is it now? 10X. I haven't played it. They 10X'd it. They 10X'd it.

Right before they 10X'd it, I won 500 sats on Blinko. Bro, what? Just saying. You just got 500 sats? Hold on. I think I already played this morning as well. So that's, I'm going to, I'm going to see if I can get them to keep it 10X through like the next, like tomorrow. People in the chat were saying Blinko made me rich.

Well, that's the, look, that's, I'm sick of hearing about a savings crisis. I'm tired of it. I'm also tired of hearing that you can't own Bitcoin in a long-term savings account. Blinko is a game on a mission. It sounds silly. There's legacy guys that are pissed at us for putting a game in a retirement account. but this game is here to solve the like i'm not kidding watch over the next five years i want to give away billions of dollars worth of bitcoin through blinko and they're gonna have to remove

me as ceo uh and get me out of there they put a bitcoin or a ceo of this company they're gonna have to figure out a way to fix that or i'm gonna keep going as hard as i can the uh the part that cracks me up is they've been playing a game the whole time it's just that they were winning the game exactly there was no dollars i've never won i've never won on the game with the old guys no right all the legacy players the game is that the money flows in their pockets now all of a sudden the money flows the other way which is uh ends up being a little bit better off for everyone else you think that's fine john i think that's very there's never a mistake in your favor yeah no there's never a mistake in your favor ever um all right joe what else you got for us

anything else no i'm uh i gotta go download the game and get some stats myself all right what if you had to kind of sum everything up in like a 30 second pitch for people why should they use choice in terms of uh putting bitcoin in their retirement account Well, Choice is an app that pays you Bitcoin every day to help save for retirement. That's it. I mean, it's less than 30 seconds. We're here. We believe that Bitcoin is the best long-term savings technology in the world, and we've coupled that with the best long-term savings account.

I'm not here for you to day trade your wealth away. I want you to build. I want you to build over the next 10, 20 years with us, and we're going to solve this savings crisis. That's it. That's all I got. That's perfect. and where can we send people to actually go and uh and get the uh the app we'll go go to the the apple ice we're on apple today we'll be in uh android probably by february or somewhere in

february ish uh and just look at choice app or stack sats uh you can literally search you can literally search in the app store for stack sat yes sir and it comes up yes sir let's go that's awesome uh the other thing is that um the i'm dropping the link right now for anyone who uh who is interested uh you can just go but click the link that i'm putting in there because then they think that we're smart and that uh that we actually sent you uh which i don't know if you get anything for that but that just sounds cool um but go ahead and uh and you can just click right on the link and uh then you can go get the app you can put bitcoin your retirement account you cannot be one of the statistics what john what did you say on friday didn't you hit us

with something about statistics what did you say yeah i forget the capacity but it was essentially like it was like i want to be the statistic in that category right right i remember i remember we're talking about leverage and getting blown up with uh with leverage and john and john was basically like we were walking out of this uh out of here and uh john hits hit us with something he goes yeah man you get blown up with leverage like nobody cares about you you're just a statistic he was like ain't nobody gonna come and send you like a get well wish you're well card like if you get blown up with leverage you're just like you're just a statistic don't be a statistic that's right so same thing here don't be a statistic make sure that you don't end up just paying all of

your retirement money to the old guys charging you obscene fees it is literally egregious like when you start to look at some of the the fee structures you start to look at how hard it is to get out uh i joke all the time that like you know you got a shitty product when you literally won't let your customers out uh-huh right that you you got a good product if you say hey listen it's one click and you're done and nobody leaves then you're good to go but if you got to put up so many walls and so much friction to keep your customers locked in like you know he can't say it But I'll say like, hey, maybe you should go revisit how you go to sleep every night because that's probably not the best way to do people with their money.