The Pomp Podcast - How the Rich Borrow Against Bitcoin Without Ever Selling | Shehzan Maredia

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. 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

Starting point is 00:00:40 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. I think the real value of Bitcoin is, it's so simple you just you stack bitcoin you save it you never sell it and you just buy a borrow against it to fund just the purchases that make your quality of life better and it really makes finance so simple what's going on guys today we got a great episode with shazan moradia he's the founder of lava and in this conversation we're going to talk about what every single person wants to talk about which is rich bitcoiners trying to figure out how to live

Starting point is 00:01:18 their life enjoy happiness and pursue all the things they want in their life without selling their Bitcoin. Everyone who stacks Bitcoin knows, number one rule of Bitcoin, do not sell your Bitcoin. And Shazan is here to explain a bunch of ways that really rich Bitcoiners are actually accomplishing this. Not selling their Bitcoin, but living the life that they want to live. He's built a ton of products for them to do, but he also has tons of really cool stories about people buying houses and cars and going on vacations, doing all kinds of fun stuff. This is what Bitcoiners ultimately are trying to do. They're trying to get to financial security and financial freedom. Shazan is here to explain it all to us. Here's my conversation with Shazan

Starting point is 00:01:51 Meridia. All right, guys, I'm super excited about this conversation. You know, one of the big things that I see happening in the Bitcoin world is that we have something called a high net worth Bitcoiner. These are basically people who have made an enormous amount of paper money. They've got a lot of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is appreciated significantly. In dollar terms, this Bitcoin is worth sometimes millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars. But they don't want to live like a monk. They don't want to just be up in the mountains with no material goods, right? I always used to joke, you can't eat your Bitcoin. You can't live in your Bitcoin. You can't sit on your Bitcoin. You still need to be able to actually live your life.

Starting point is 00:02:22 And especially for people who are hyper wealthy, they're trying to figure out, okay, I got all this paper money, but how do I actually go and use this in my life? Part of driving some sort of outsized financial return for yourself is being able to enjoy it. And we see this in tech in general. If you look at maybe an open AI, I always love seeing that whenever open AI does a secondary or a tender, all of a sudden home prices in San Francisco and the Bay Area, they all tick up a little bit. All that money goes from the company to the employee's pocket. Then it goes and it buys real estate or it buys cars or it goes and gets consumed in different ways. And so what we're going to do today is we're going to talk to a team that they've really been working hard on trying to

Starting point is 00:02:59 figure out what is it that these high net worth Bitcoiners, what do they need? What are the solutions to their problems? How can you do something, which I try to do? How do you basically hold your Bitcoin, never have to sell it, rule number one of Bitcoin, never sell, but also be able to live the life that you feel like you have either earned or you want to live. And so you don't want to have lots of Bitcoin, but live like a monk. And you also don't want to sell all of your Bitcoin and then have a bunch of material goods, but give up on kind of the Bitcoin dream or the Bitcoin thesis. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Maybe where we can start with the conversation is describe these high net worth Bitcoiners, right? These are

Starting point is 00:03:37 multiplying in number as Bitcoin goes higher and higher, but who are they? How did they come into the Bitcoin and what exactly are they doing in their lives, you know, outside of any sort of financial strategy? Well, thanks for having me on. So a lot of these Bitcoiners, they accumulated their Bitcoin by selling their chairs, you know, and now they realize that Bitcoin is the best savings asset. But we always say at Lava, it's not just about saving, it's about what saving makes possible, right? So what's really fascinating about a lot of these Bitcoiners is that they aren't actually necessarily extremely high income, but it's because they were saving in Bitcoin for the last decade that now they have so much wealth that they haven't been able to tap into. And now

Starting point is 00:04:21 that Bitcoin has appreciated past 100K, a lot of them, I felt like that was really the price point where they were starting to look at now, how do I use this Bitcoin to make my dream purchases, to improve my quality of life? So a lot of these guys, they may not have actually had millions and millions of dollars of income in a given year, but actually it was like, not so how much you make, but how much you save. And that saving then just got put into Bitcoin and then Bitcoin kind of did the work from there. I've never seen a group of users that had such low income, but such high wealth. And really Bitcoin is what created that for them. The best decision that they made financially was to just save in Bitcoin. That makes me so excited. Like, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:58 if you really think in a weird way, historically it has been people had to go and drive really, really high income levels. And whether you did it as a W-2 or you did it as an entrepreneur, pretty much the only path that you had was you just had to get paid an enormous amount of money. But it is somewhat liberating, I guess, like economically to say to somebody, it doesn't matter. You can be a teacher. You can be a firefighter or a police officer. You can be any profession in the world. You can make a lot of money or not make a lot of money. As long as you live within your means, take the excess and put it into this savings technology. then all of a sudden you can drive the balance sheet side and really create wealth for you and

Starting point is 00:05:35 your family exactly one of our users is a teacher and makes you know less than 100k but has been stacking bitcoin over the last decade and by using lava he's a rich teacher yeah has millions i think maybe it's more than 10 million in bitcoin now which is pretty insane for someone whose income doesn't really match their wealth and they've been able to tap into their bitcoin using lava to get a better house, to support their entire family, their extended family, even to get a better car. So it is really cool. And I think it really goes to show the impact saving can have on your life. So there's a teacher that for years has been just saving income and putting it into Bitcoin. Now he's won $10 million in Bitcoin. You know, what's funny is Dave Ramsey, who I think

Starting point is 00:06:18 Dave is a great guy. I think he's helped a ton of people. He gets a lot of hard time from the Bitcoiners because he doesn't like Bitcoin, but he does this survey. I think it's every year, maybe every couple of years. And he basically looks at what are the professions that are most likely to become millionaires in America? One of the top five professions is being a teacher. Which is kind of shocking. Like the average pay for a teacher, I think it's like somewhere around 50K across the country. And so you're like, how does somebody who gets paid 50K? And a huge reason is because culturally, like, have you ever seen a teacher drive a Ferrari or wear a Rolex, right? Or like, is that the club at, you know, on Friday and Saturday night, like wasting all their money?

Starting point is 00:06:53 No, of course not. They live within their means. And from a personality standpoint, the people who become teachers, the cultural, like memetic nature is not to go spend a bunch of money. And so in a weird way, they actually have very high savings rates. And then they just do that over time and it builds up wealth. Bitcoin kind of just supercharges that. So like, it's weird that a teacher has $10 million. Like that's, you know, kind of surprising.

Starting point is 00:07:15 But at the same time, like maybe it's not that weird. yeah i didn't actually think about a teacher from that perspective but it makes a lot of sense um and we you know we've had users that are you know we have one of these users uh he also doesn't make a lot of income i think he's in like construction and you know he borrowed against his bitcoin to buy a house um and it was what's really interesting is now that home prices are so high um there's like a basket of people right now that have so much wealth that they haven't tapped into and they're great buyers of real estate and what he did is he actually can't qualify for a traditional mortgage for the house that he really wanted to buy because his income isn't there

Starting point is 00:07:53 because the income is not there and also the bank probably doesn't count the bitcoin towards the mortgage right so for those that don't know if you've tried to go buy a house you want to get a mortgage uh and you have an enormous amount of uh percentage basis of your net worth in bitcoin uh the bank basically tells you zero right and i think i've told the story before that um a couple of years ago, I had this happen where the bank basically came to me and they were like, Hey man, um, we love you as a client. According to our calculation based on this bank framework, you don't have any money. And I was like, Oh my God, what do you mean? And they were like, yeah, dude, you have no public equities, right? Everything is private investments and Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Like we can't count that stuff. And so that was actually the impetus for me to start doing stuff in the public market was like, I need to be able to show the bank assets. Now it is changing a little bit because the banks are starting to be able to recognize bitcoin and crypto assets yeah but i do think there's a very large portion of people who kind of felt like outcasts in the traditional financial system it's like i have this wealth but it doesn't count that he literally told me that he felt like an outcast oh really uh that's a right word to say and especially so and one of the nice things about him being able to tap into his bitcoin instantly with lava was that he was able to take that cash right away and make a cash offer on his house and you know in today's

Starting point is 00:09:10 market if you actually make a cash offer you can get a 10 to maybe even a 20 discount on your purchase price and he was able to get a discount on his purchase price and buy his dream house all right so let's talk about um before we get to the the product you guys have built um i think there's a strategy which we call a little bit of alpha for people who uh whether you have wealth or you're aspiring to kind of reach financial security and financial freedom um buy borrow die right like that is the quintessential strategy of rich people describe like how this strategy works in the traditional world so basically the real the main alpha in finance is you want to buy what you think is the best savings asset which you know i think you and me and a lot of people

Starting point is 00:09:52 believe is bitcoin you never want to sell your bitcoin that's the you know what you mentioned the first rule of your bitcoin is to never sell your bitcoin if you sell an appreciating asset you lose exposure to its upside and two you have taxable consequences which is why rich people wealthy people have been doing this against real estate and equities for decades and now bitcoiners are able to do that too because bitcoin is appreciating at you know 50 compounded if you can borrow at five percent against your bitcoin not only do you capture that spread between the upside and the interest rate you also don't face the taxable consequences of selling your bitcoin because what rich people are historically doing is let's say they buy equities they have s&p 500

Starting point is 00:10:29 exposure, rather than sell the S&P 500 exposure to go and buy a house, a car, spend it on a vacation, whatever, is they just borrow against it. And when they borrow, they're paying some interest. But to your point, they're avoiding the taxes, and then they don't have to give up the exposure. And I always go back to my favorite example of what happens when you have equity exposure is Mackenzie Bezos. You know about this? Mackenzie Bezos. I should look up the exact number. She has donated post-divorce. She got like 25% in multi-billionaire. She's donated something like $7 or $9 billion to different causes, but she has more money today than she had at the time of divorce. Really?

Starting point is 00:11:06 Even though she's given away like, you know, whatever, $8 to $10 billion. She's borrowed to... Not even borrowed. It's just that Amazon stock has appreciated at a faster rate than she can give away the money. So she's literally just like, you know, I don't know, lighting it on fire. Like some of the college she's given to is crazy right but amazon stock continues to appreciate the same thing here is if you're borrowing and this stock the bitcoin the real estate whatever the thing is continues to appreciate faster than the rate that you're borrowing at in a weird way you still have you know kind of come out on top yeah one thing one of our users told me that i hadn't thought

Starting point is 00:11:38 about before was he wanted to feel really aligned with bitcoin's upside and he said yes it financially made sense for me to borrow but the other thing was he didn't want to feel salty if he had sold this Bitcoin and Bitcoin started to appreciate. So he was like, I knew that for my own peace of mind, that borrowing would keep me still aligned with Bitcoin success. So it wasn't just the financial decision for him. It was also just wanting to feel aligned with the market and the upside of Bitcoin. Today's episode is brought to you by Simple Mining. Have you ever been interested in mining Bitcoin? As a miner myself, I've been using Simple Mining for the past few months and the experience has been nothing short of seamless. I mine with the pool of my choice

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Starting point is 00:13:22 That's simplemining.io slash pomp to get started today. With Simple Mining, they make it simple. All right, so let's talk about, you guys have built two different products for this specific type of user. So people who have Bitcoin, they want liquidity, they don't want to sell, they want to stay aligned with Bitcoin. Let's talk about the non-line of credit product first, like just kind of more traditional borrowing. How does this work? So it's pretty straightforward.

Starting point is 00:13:44 You take your Bitcoin and you lock it up as collateral. It's never rehypothecated. It's safe. We can prove to you that your collateral is safe. And you borrow 50% against the Bitcoin you put. As cash, you get it fully instantly anywhere you are in the world. And there's an interest rate attached. So the interest starts occurring and you can...

Starting point is 00:14:04 The original loan product required you... it was similar to a mortgage. It requires you to make monthly payments. There's a fixed term that you decide on when you initiate the loan. And so throughout the loan, you're making monthly payments. And at the end of the loan, you'll repay your loan in full, or you can extend your loan. Okay. So let's just say that somebody's got $100,000 worth of Bitcoin for a round number. So I got $100,000 of Bitcoin. I can borrow 50,000 against it. What is the interest rate that I'm paying on that? 5%? 5% to 10% on the original product.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Okay. So let's say I got a hundred thousand Bitcoin. I borrow 50,000. I got to pay somewhere between five to 10%, depending on a whole bunch of factors. Do you have to underwrite me as a borrower or you just underwrite how much Bitcoin I'm giving you? One of the things that people get really, everyone that bars against their Bitcoin with lava, almost everyone texts me or messages us saying, this is crazy. Like no documentation required at all. It was just about what I had, which was my Bitcoin. Not about anything of me as a person. I mean, the meritocracy that this creates right where um you know i've gone deep down the rabbit hole of the discrimination inside the banks and sometimes it's based on race religion uh they just don't like you uh we have

Starting point is 00:15:13 seen how many things get politicized it's like if they have to underwrite the borrower rather than the assets it introduces human bias and therefore some people get better rates some people get worse rates some people get better you know get the loan some people don't here what you're essentially doing is you're saying i think anywhere in the world yes doesn't matter who you are if you show with $100,000 of Bitcoin, we will give you a loan against it. And there's a rate, there is a term to it. And it is probably the most like meritocrate, you know, process. Like, you know, this is the constraints. We're transparent about exactly what the rates are per the amount of borrow and you just get the loan. Okay. So when somebody does this, let's just use easy numbers. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:15:54 go ahead. I'm going to borrow $50,000. How long does that loan usually last for? Most people borrow for a year. Usually people have been extending their loans past that. So when you get to the end of the year, you just say, Hey, extend me longer. Exactly. All right. And I just keep paying my 5% on a monthly basis. It's 5% annualized, but I got monthly payments. And as long as I keep paying, I'm good. What happens if I stop paying? If you stop paying your, we actually don't close your loan, but your interest just accrues more. Got it. Okay. So you're just accruing it more. What are the cases where the $100,000 of Bitcoin that I'm posting does not become mine anymore? If it gets liquidated. And so how does that work? So any loan that you take that is

Starting point is 00:16:32 over collateralized, the way it works for the lender to be able to offer you such a low rate is they need confidence that if your loan becomes under collateralized or close to that, that they can sell the Bitcoin. So they're always made whole because from a lender perspective, this is essentially a risk-free rate of return that they're getting on their dollars, right? So there is a certain LTV. Anytime you make a loan, you can see that LTV, which is a loan to value ratio if you want to look at as a liquidation price there's also in a way you can think about it is if bitcoin goes to this certain price your loan can get liquidated unless you add more collateral ahead of time we have a feature in lava where if you just have the bitcoin not even as

Starting point is 00:17:11 collateral but on lava we can automatically add it so that your loan won't get liquidated let's talk about from the lender side right so i've looked at a bunch of these businesses been involved in them and one of the things that i am shocked by is that the major banks have not gotten into lending against Bitcoin, right? I've told a story recently that back in 2018, 2019, I wrote this story. I wrote this letter and I said that Bitcoin was pristine collateral. And a lawyer friend of mine messaged me and goes, you're like insane. Like, stop saying that, right? But the point was, and I still believe this, is in a normal asset-backed loan, let's say a car, I come, I apply for a car loan. You as the lender, give me the money. I go buy the car and I leave with

Starting point is 00:17:51 the car. So I have the collateral. You have basically a piece of paper that says, I'll pay you back. If I stop paying, you got to come find the car. You got to find me, you got to find the car, you got to repossess the car, and then you got to liquidate the car. That's a really expensive, time-consuming process. And it's not even guaranteed you're going to find the car. And so there's like this loss ratio that comes with, hey, we just know we're going to lose, you know, whatever, two, 5% of the book. With Bitcoin, it is almost the exact opposite. It solves all these problems. So I'm going to give you $100,000 of Bitcoin. You're going to be a $50,000 loan. You got the Bitcoin, right? I got the money that I borrowed. If at any point,

Starting point is 00:18:24 the price of Bitcoin starts to go down, you don't have to sell $100,000 worth of Bitcoin, right? You can sell pieces because it's fractional. And so as you start to sell, you're essentially making sure that you guys aren't going to lose money. But you're very clear and upfront with users in terms of here are the price points. And there's things they can do to cure it. They can post collateral, close out the loan, whatever. But this seems like a huge advancement for the traditional financial world. If now all of a sudden they can do over collateralized lending and do it at rates where people really want to borrow. Yeah. It seems like it's serving both sides of the market. I think that, you know, Bitcoin is the most liquid asset in the world.

Starting point is 00:18:59 It trades 24 seven and globally. And, you know, we've even seen a couple of weeks ago, someone through galaxy sold more than $10 billion of Bitcoin and the price didn't move, which is pretty insane. Um, I think in like 10 years, people will view lending against Bitcoin as the new risk-free rate of return. Now, when you look at this new product that you guys just came out with this line of credit, explain what the differences are with the line of credit product. So one thing we realized as we were serving all these users taking what was previously, I would call it a Bitcoin mortgage, was that a lot of people are retired on Bitcoin and they want more flexibility on payments and on terms. And so this new line of credit is the first line

Starting point is 00:19:39 of credit against Bitcoin. I call it a B-lock, kind of like a HELOC, but for Bitcoin. And It's fully open term. So when you borrow against your Bitcoin, when you lock your Bitcoin, your loan can be open indefinitely. So as someone who never wants to sell your Bitcoin, you have this loan that is this line of credit that is open indefinitely forever. And on payments, instead of a fixed payment schedule, now you have fully flexible repayments. You can repay whenever you want. There is no required monthly payments. So really what we did here is we still offer fixed rate, flexible repayments and open terms really to offer people what I think is the ideal loan product.

Starting point is 00:20:13 because it is the most frictionless, simple, and safe. Now, when you do this, again, I post $100,000. You give me a $50,000 loan. Two things that I think are pretty interesting. One, there's no end to the loan. So I could do this for 20 years if I want, right? Now, I'm accruing interest there. And I could choose to pay monthly

Starting point is 00:20:31 or I could choose just to pay at the end. Exactly. And so it gives like maximum flexibility. What are reasons why somebody would not want to pay monthly and just kind of pay off? so so one of our users uh he doesn't make any income right now he doesn't have a job he has bitcoin and he's an investor actually like a angel investor and he's actually been borrowing with lava right now but he was telling me that what would be the ideal preferred uh use case for him

Starting point is 00:20:55 he borrowed to you know buy a house and also to buy a really nice car and he was saying in two years he's expecting that one of his companies is going to go public so he's going to have a liquidity event but for those two years he actually doesn't want to make any payments and so now with this line of credit he can do that because he can borrow a million dollars against two million dollars of bitcoin he can accrue interest and when one of his companies goes public if he wants to he can uh sell that stock and pay down some of his line of credit got it and what are some other examples of people using these products like what are they buying any like really crazy stories of uh people doing kind of insane things yeah there's one guy this

Starting point is 00:21:30 is also kind of interesting uh he's like a customer support uh he's been in customer support client services, you know, for just fintechs, not as extremely high paying job, actually, but his dream purchase ever since he was a kid was to buy a Porsche. And he actually bought a Porsche using lava the other day, which is, you know, a very flashy purchase. But, you know, that was his dream purchase. And he was able to do that. I don't know if I'd recommend that, right? I don't know if I'd recommend that. Basically take out a loan to buy a Porsche. Yeah, exactly. But it is a very flashy purchase, but, you know, I actually talked to him about it

Starting point is 00:22:00 after because he hadn't told us that was what he was doing but then he uh like you know messaged us about it and i thought it was a pretty like so like that that's interesting too is like they don't even tell you what they're using the loan proceeds for right if you go to a bank and you want a loan they not only want to know what it is they kind of like pass judgment you know if you were like hey i want to take a loan to go buy a porsche like they're definitely not giving a loan yeah yeah i think that you know for me i have the ethos of uh bitcoin as a savings asset and i think bitcoin has a lot of implications for consumerism but you know we're not going to judge you on whatever you do with the loan proceeds. Yeah. All right. So I'm an investor. You guys have

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Starting point is 00:23:47 Go check it out today. So we basically every loan business makes money in just one way, which is there's a cost of capital and then you make loans and you take a little margin all right and then say what your cost of capital is so our cost of capital right now is between like four and a half to seven and a half percent okay but now we're actually we're reducing it pretty significantly so right now we're actually making all loans with the line of credit at a five percent interest rate yeah and we also say is if you're lending at five percent but you're paying seven that don't work no no but we're mostly using our cost of capital at like four and a half to five right now

Starting point is 00:24:22 okay uh but the other thing that we're also doing is um we also may just make money when users use us across through other things so loans we're actually not trying to make like we're trying to just be break even on the loan product okay right now so you make money because we we serve all sorts of other financial services to people a lot of people that use lava to bar against their bitcoin uh start using us to do like uh buying bitcoin for example they start using us to make dollar payments because you have cash now you need to make payments with that cash uh you'll start using us do that. We're going to, there's a lot of products that we have in beta that we haven't announced that people are using us for to more seamlessly make their payments. And really for

Starting point is 00:24:59 Lava, what we aim to be is a technology company for Bitcoin wealth management. So I think you have all these like crypto trading companies right now in crypto. We don't really want to touch any other digital asset other than Bitcoin, but we've seen that people use Lava for, you know, buying a house, all these other things. And there's software that we're going to create that makes all of these things a lot easier for you to manage your Bitcoin wealth. Why don't you want to do anything else? You're not like into ETH or Sol or Avalanche

Starting point is 00:25:28 or Dogcoin or Fortcoin or any of these? So the way I kind of view Bitcoin's vision is that it really makes saving simple. Like the reason I got into Bitcoin originally, just based on my background, was I saw my parents struggling with not just figuring out how to make income, but how to store the value of their money.

Starting point is 00:25:47 And Bitcoin to me is sound money. and i think today every financial platform i see they want you to speculate and we want you to save and so we're really focused on this vision where bitcoin is the foundation of your your wealth it's the foundation of your saving and if you really think about what you want in a financial experience you want something that grows your savings and if you believe bitcoin is your savings you want something that helps grow your bitcoin over time and that's what we want to do we really measure our success but with how much more bitcoin do you have because you use lava versus if you didn't now when you guys are building the company like who the heck is working

Starting point is 00:26:21 with this company where you finding these people there are they like uh nerd computer scientists are they you know coming from wall street we've we've hired people from we've had some people from bitcoin who've been developers in the industry for more than a decade uh have invented some of the core cryptography and protocols that make bitcoin what it is we've also hired people from a fintech perspective we've hired people from some of the largest fintechs um we've even our investors are you're an investor uh but also founders he has to say me first because i'm sitting here go ahead and you know like keith from cosla and founders fund we've actually leaned on their networks as well to help us find the best talent uh in the industry across not just bitcoin

Starting point is 00:26:59 but also fintech and larger tech as well all right am i gonna make money on this investment i hope so yeah we hope so that don't make me very i'm supposed to say hell yeah you are you will all right and then uh what like what's next what else are you guys going to build so um right now our next we're really focused on just scaling out this line of credit but i mean i'll give a teaser for the people that are um viewing this right now we're building a card right now a card yes so basically it's already in beta and it'll be rolled out to basically everyone over the next like month or two um and the real value of this is right now we launched a feature about a month ago where we can create a bitcoin bank account for you so if you go to your rippling

Starting point is 00:27:40 uh you're like just someone working at one of my friends is working at a startup in san francisco he actually started doing this too uh he just wants to stack bitcoin with every paycheck he's all in on bitcoin so we create this bitcoin bank account you go to rippling you put it as your bank account your employer doesn't even know you're stacking bitcoin with it but anytime you send money to it it gets converted to bitcoin with zero fees and gets sent to your lava account now you're all in on bitcoin now you have your line of credit you can borrow against it to make purchases but right now uh obviously people aren't accepting like qr codes everywhere in america but most people accept cards so we have this card that we're launching that anytime you

Starting point is 00:28:15 swipe it it will literally draw on your line of credit to fund the purchase at the point of sale so you can live on it so basically it's a credit card that if uh you use you're using a line of credit against your bitcoin rather than a normal credit card and so what are the advantages like a lower interest rate um well you're already going to get the interest rate that you get the line of credit five percent but what's lower than credit cards that are ripping people off at 29 percent for sure that that should be a crime yeah like look i get a market forces and stuff but that's crazy that that is crazy i mean that is preying on people who don't know what's going on for sure but i will say most bitcoiners are probably not uh at least from my perspective

Starting point is 00:28:49 racking on that level of credit card debt the real value is you're oh you mean the people who believe in sound money aren't back up debt is paying 29 interest okay exactly but the real value is now you can get paid in bitcoin your employer doesn't have to change you're saving in bitcoin you're you're never selling it and you can now pay wherever you want uh your employer doesn't change the merchant doesn't change but you live on a bitcoin standard and that's really what the line of credit along with the card along with the getting paid in bitcoin kind of enables for us got it and uh is like everyone going to do this in the future or do you think that this is still going to be like a subset of uh right now what i say is that we have people that are really living

Starting point is 00:29:23 this future over bitcoin is their savings asset obviously not everyone in the world is but i i've I've seen over the last few years that more and more people are living this future. One thing that's kind of interesting- You got cash? You got dollars? I mean, I have just enough dollars for any purchase that I make. All right. So I'm all in on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:29:41 But what I- You're like a Bitcoin maximalist, dollar minimalist. Exactly. I call it base Bitcoiners. Base Bitcoiners? Because they're living a Bitcoin-based lifestyle. And then one thing I've realized is a lot of people, they started only stacking like 10% of their wealth in Bitcoin, but then they just become base Bitcoiners because of Bitcoin's

Starting point is 00:30:00 appreciation. Yeah. Well, you know what's funny is I used to be like that, right? I mean, there's a famous picture of my wife sitting on the floor in an apartment we had. We don't need a couch. We're good for a couple of months. But also you start, you get married, you got kids, all that kind of stuff. The kids, they can't eat Bitcoin, right? And then if you sell it, then you got the tax consequences. Then all of a sudden it becomes this weird dynamic where you want to stack as much bitcoin as possible but also you're like i do need the dollars because i got to get rid of these things you know in the coming months so it is this it uh as people i think get a little bit older as they have a little bit you know different responsibilities in life

Starting point is 00:30:34 it almost becomes this thing where you want to keep the ethos of bitcoin but also uh in a way buying the bitcoin and then coming back out of the bitcoin may actually be more detrimental than just maybe saving a little bit of you know cash and like a expense account if you will right Exactly. Or just at the time of purchase, you know, to borrow on your line of credit. That makes it, what's the card going to be called? Just the Lava card. Just the Lava card? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:59 That's fine. Anything else that you think that people should know about or any other tips, tricks, alpha you got for them? I think the real value of Bitcoin is, it's so simple. You just, you stock Bitcoin, you save it, you never sell it. And you just buy a borrow against it to fund just the purchases that make your quality of life better. And it really makes finance so simple. In Satoshi, we trust. In Satoshi, we trust. Okay.

Starting point is 00:31:21 All right. Where can people go to check out Lava? You can go to our website, lava.xyz, and download our mobile app or use our web app. All right. Can I do something I've never done on the podcast before? You like feedback? Yeah. Yeah?

Starting point is 00:31:32 I want everyone to go in the YouTube comments and leave a comment whether you think I'm going to make money on this or not. We're going to find out. I want good feedback if you use the product. I want bad feedback, suggestions. I want you to critique it, everything you got, and then you guys go through and see what you want to do. I'll respond to every comment.

Starting point is 00:31:46 You're going to respond to every comment? Yes. There you go. all right uh i appreciate taking the time to do this we'll do it again in the future yes thanks

The Pomp Podcast - How the Rich Borrow Against Bitcoin Without Ever Selling | Shehzan Maredia

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