We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC108: Bitcoin Retirement and Inheritance Planning w/ Jeff Vandrew and Phil Geiger (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:07 - What has been happening at Unchained Capital since the FTX blow-up? 07:13 - What are some of the most common concerns of Self-Custody? 12:47 - Why is Title ...and Possession such an important thing to cover with inheritance planning? 22:43 - The difference between non-probate assets versus probate assets. 28:38 - What are the risks of not properly performing inheritance planning? 30:15 - Checkbook IRA versus other methods. 39:59 - Legal and policy update after the FTX situation. 01:01:37 - Biggest mistakes people make in inheritance planning. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Unchained Capital. Information on the The McNulty Case. Jeff Vandrew's Twitter. Phil Geiger's Twitter. Related Episode: Bitcoin Retirement Planning & Self Custody w/ Parker Lewis & Jeff Vandrew - BTC069. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Sound Advisory American Express The Bitcoin Way Vacasa USPS Onramp SimpleMining Public Fundrise BAM Capital Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. A lot has happened over the past month with FTX fraudgently using customer deposits to trade Bitcoin, and now they're some of the biggest withdraws from exchanges like Binance and others. On today's show, we talked to two leading experts in taking self-custody of your Bitcoin and why it's so important, and my guests are Jeff Van Drew and Phil Geiger. Additionally, we talk about retirement and inheritance planning for Bitcoin owners, These are important topics for people to maximize their performance over a long holding period.
Starting point is 00:00:35 So without further delay, here's my chat with Phil and Jeff. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Phil and Jeff. Guys, welcome to the Investors podcast and Bitcoin Fundamentals. Awesome to be back. Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
Starting point is 00:01:10 Thrill to have you guys. So this is my first and obvious question for you. FTX blew up. You guys are a self-custody company. I would imagine your phone has been ringing off the hook since the FTX bankruptcy. What the heck has it been like at Unchained Capital since the FDX blow up? Yeah, I can take this one or at least take the first stab at it. It's been the busiest month that Unchane has ever seen.
Starting point is 00:01:36 And what we are really seeing is our value proposition demonstrated very, very clearly. Yes. So as these crypto exchanges and crypto lenders are starting to collapse and shut down withdrawals, our company was designed from first principles holding your own keys. That's just not even possible for unchanged, right? Our clients are holding the keys to their Bitcoin. So for our custody service, our vaults, they always have full control. There's no way for us to prevent them from access.
Starting point is 00:02:06 their Bitcoin. And even for our loans, our clients have one key and keys are distributed. So while all these crypto lenders are re-hypothicating client Bitcoin and realizing that when you're re-hypothicating something that has a fixed supply of $21 million, it's extremely difficult and you don't just get a bailout. Yeah, our value proposition has been very clear. So it's been an extremely, extremely busy month at Unchained and things I think are going to continue as this idea of private keys and real ownership over your Bitcoin. continues to permeate into the masses. Jeff,
Starting point is 00:02:40 you got any highlights from the past month? It's been an amazing ride. You know, at the same time when all these other companies are collapsing, and I don't like to speak ill with the dead or dance on people's graves, but it has been just a huge influx of business for us. As Phil said, it's been a huge validation of our business model.
Starting point is 00:02:58 Phil's out there on the front lines because he leads the client-facing team. You know, my role here is more head of legal, so I'm in the back doing all the, the unsexy stuff, so to speak. But, you know, just talking to, you know, our guys who are out there talking to people, I can tell that it's really getting through to people now. The message that we've been trying to send all these years at Unchained,
Starting point is 00:03:20 you know, as to why this sort of thing is important, this became like a real life illustration of that. Now, what's unfortunate is there were a lot of people that had to get burned before they realized that. As Phil said, you know, re-hypothecating in the traditional financial system is one thing. And that really only works because nobody has any idea what number of things
Starting point is 00:03:42 there are, right? So dollars is easy, right? Because you just print more of them. But even stuff like shares of stock, you know, the market capitalization you read for a company is like an estimate. Nobody actually knows like how many real shares of like Microsoft there are. There's like ballpark figures out there, but it's not entirely clear, right? So that sort of stuff doesn't fly. and I think unfortunately, in this case, it did take a real life illustration for people to get the message. Now, the good news is, if you believe like Phil and I do, that Bitcoin's really at the beginning of its arc here, and it's not too late for you, which I definitely don't think it is, if you were one of those people that did get burned by one of these collapses, actually it's kind of a good thing for you, right? Because the silver lining is you learned your lesson early,
Starting point is 00:04:27 and now you can get your hands on real Bitcoin before things go parabolic, maybe. Yeah, and to your point about the, oh, go ahead, Phil. Yeah, I was going to say, before we move on, Jeff, are you telling Preston's audience that you don't run a full Microsoft node? No, unfortunately. You're not validating the number of shares of Microsoft what's going on. Sorry. Well, there are exchanges out there. And these exchanges make a lot of money rehypothicating stock certificates.
Starting point is 00:04:55 And I don't think a lot of people, you know, if you're getting zero fees for trading, how is that company making money? Well, they're making money because they're re-hypothicating stock certificates. And you often wonder, now that people will have an up-close and personal understanding of, like, FDX's balance of negative, I think it was like 80,000 Bitcoin, negative balance of 80,000 Bitcoin. And the ledgers that they had created with other shadow banks and shadow exchanges is how they do this stuff. And you have to ask yourself and you have to wonder, like, how many paper stock certificates are. out there between exchanges that are re-hypothicating them in order to make money on the lending that the person who thinks they're holding that share because they see it when they log into their account, it's not there. It's not physically there. It can't be audited because nobody can run a
Starting point is 00:05:46 note on something like that, to your point. It's important stuff. And I think that this has just made a whole lot of people think twice about what the heck is going on. When I came into this space, Mount Gawks had just happened. I showed up in 15, beginning of 15, and that was just all everybody talked about was Mount Gawks. And so it was just always beat into my head early on. You take possession of your coins because if you leave them on the exchange, you can blow up like Mount Gawks. We hadn't seen this. And so now this happens in such a spectacular way, not in a good way, but like just everybody in the world can see this. And we're reliving Mount Gawks. it with just, I don't know how many more people are involved in this, but it's insane.
Starting point is 00:06:32 A number of people, and it's also the sheen of respectability thing, because I date back to around the same time as you, Preston. Yeah. And a lot of people probably rationalized it by saying, like, well, Malgox was like a trading card website, like in some other country, and you had to do weird stuff with PayPal. You know, these new institutions now, like FTCS, oh, they're part of the legitimate system, and they're highly regulated, and they have been. bank accounts and they got Tom Brady.
Starting point is 00:07:00 Yeah, Tom Brady and Larry David and they're, you know, talking to congressmen and stuff like that, you know what I mean? So I think this really got across that it doesn't matter whether you're a trading card website overseas or you've got a big fancy office building in Miami or whatever. It's really the same thing at the end of the day. I think we could even make the argument that the flashier, the exchange and the more of a meteororic rise that. it has, the more concern people should have in this particular space because you can't do the fractional reserve games of the legacy system with these assets, with Bitcoin specifically. Like, you just can't. You can't fake it. This is crazy. And I feel terrible for all these people
Starting point is 00:07:51 who just got wrecked, who did not understand what they were dealing with, and that we're totally duped by the celebrity behind so much of the FTX stuff and a lot of the other things that blew up. So as a person would transition from that to unchained, I've had family members that have called me up and they're just like, I want to take self custody. I've heard about it. In fact, they've actually said, talk to me about unchained capital. My uncle actually brought that up to me.
Starting point is 00:08:21 And he's like, I'm just concerned that I just don't have the technical competence to take possession of my keys. So how do you guys deal with that particular concern? Is this something you hear a lot? I suspect it is. But walk us through what you would say to that type of person. You have got the right guy for this because that is Phil's entire role. I don't want to say his entire role because Phil does a lot of really important stuff at Unchained.
Starting point is 00:08:45 But that's Phil's primary role. So I'm going to let him take this one. All right. And I'd like to think that the Unchained Conciergeist team is designed for your uncle. Now, in my experience, really, the thing that people are nervous about, and maybe they don't quite know it yet, but the thing that they're nervous about is having a single point of failure for their Bitcoin. And they feel like if they're holding the keys, they're going to make a mistake, they're going to lose all their Bitcoin. And there's been a lot of, there have been a ton of news articles of people who have lost their Bitcoin. The famous news articles of the hard drive in a dump somewhere in England or whatever with like $200 million of Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:09:28 the New York Times article about the guy who forgot the pin to his ledger or whatever. There's a lot of those articles. And the consistent trait among all of them is that there was a single point of failure. Now, at Unchained and the concierge team, what we do is we walk clients through setting up Bitcoin addresses where there are no single points of failure. And when I say no single points of failure, I can just list them all. Unchained capital is not a single point of failure for your Bitcoin. You as a client are not a single point of failure for your Bitcoin. You have total control of the Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:10:01 You have enough keys to move Bitcoin on your own, but you have a lot of redundancy. So if you make a critical mistake, you don't lose your Bitcoin. And I think that's really what has been resonating with people. And that's why we're seeing adoption tick up. It's this idea of collaborative custody, which is what we do at Unchained, where we have a minority of keys and clients have a majority of keys, means that you can make one of those mistakes without losing Bitcoin. And that I think is the biggest pain point that people have with self-custody or even just taking that step of self-custody. The other thing that we do is, so my team will literally ship you hardware wallets, a little devices will help you set them up,
Starting point is 00:10:39 we'll walk you through creating them, building a vault. And what we always say is, hey, now that you have your Bitcoin address that you control, It doesn't mean that you need to move, you know, all 100, whatever thousand Bitcoin that you have or, you know, if you're just getting started, it doesn't mean you have to buy all of your Bitcoin and hold it directly there. You can start with just a little bit. Start with 10 bucks. Try it out. Get a feel for it. Learn the tools. We're there for you. You can call us up. And we'll hop on another call to walk you through these processes. And I think, yeah, it's really designed for folks that are nervous about holding keys. And what's nice about it
Starting point is 00:11:14 is I actually believe it is the most secure way to store Bitcoin because there are no single points of failure. There's a lot of really hardcore site for punk ways to set up your Bitcoin vault, but a lot of those end up creating yourself as a single point of failure. If you get hit in the head, what's going to happen to your Bitcoin? Are people going to be able to recover it? Yeah, and I want to just tell a real life story related to Phil's point. I know a decent amount about Bitcoin. I knew multi-sig was important before Unchained really hit the scene. I used to have my own multi-signature set up for my Bitcoin that I structured myself with Electrum. But when Bitcoin really came, I mean, excuse me, when Unchained came on my radar,
Starting point is 00:11:54 which was before I was working for the company, I still moved my coins to Unchained, it's a multi-sig for Unchained. The reason why I did that is because just because I could do all those things in a very complicated and to most people intimidating way, I knew that my family members couldn't if I wasn't around. They were going to have a lot of trouble. So, I mean, at that time, Phil was with the company at that time. So it was basically a matter of me being able to tell my family members like, hey, something goes wrong. You can call Phil and his team, you know what I mean? They'll walk you through what you need to do to make sure these coins don't get lost.
Starting point is 00:12:27 Yeah, I think that's an important point for a lot of people, especially for all the tech savvy, you know, people that are out there that set it all off. It's just like, you know, I know my wife. And, yeah, she's not going to be doing that type. of stuff. So she needs somebody that she can access. We have a protocol set up and it's an important thing for people to think about. Talk to us about, so that speaking of protocols, so you guys leave this past week, I have a thing called the inheritance protocol. Walk us through what you guys are trying to do with this and why you guys think it's important. And then talk to us about two terms. I know this is kind of a multi-part question here, but you got two terms.
Starting point is 00:13:11 title and possession. Talk us through all these ideas. Yeah, sure. I'll start and then I'll pass it over to Phil because a lot, I would say the bigger part of this protocol really has been Phil's brainchild. He's been amazing in getting this thing rolled out. So, you know, what I found, what's a little bit unusual about my background for a guy that's, you know, head of legal for a company is when I was in practice in my own firm, I actually specialized in estate planning. So this was actually my real wheelhouse and area of the law when I was in practice. So when I came to Unchained, you know, I would get a lot of questions from our, you know, client solutions people and client services people who are talking to
Starting point is 00:13:50 our customers every day. And they would say, hey, we get these people that are just very, very concerned about how their loved ones are going to get a hold of their Bitcoin, you know, when they pass away. And, you know, at the time, I was kind of like, well, I mean, there's really not, there's not a lot to this, right? It's an asset. It passes like anything else, et cetera. But what I realized when I really took a step back and thought about that question harder, is Bitcoiners tend to have this idea where they only think about the possession side of the equation and not the title side of the equation. And to illustrate with those words, I mean, I'm going to give you a really, really simple example that doesn't even involve Bitcoin because this applies to pretty much any
Starting point is 00:14:30 kind of property. Preston, if you had, let's say, a big bar gold sitting on your desk there, right? If while you, after tonight, after we finish recording, if you were to go to bed and I snuck into your house and I grabbed that bar of gold and I ran out the door, I mean, I have possession of that bar of gold, right? But I don't have title to it. I don't have any sort of valid title to it. And as a result, if you looked at your security camera and you saw me walk into your house and grab that bar of gold, in addition, and I just even forget about all the criminal stuff for a second, you could sue me, right, to get that bar of gold back. It's yours. It belongs to you. the fact that I possess it doesn't mean a whole lot, right, in that in that instance per se. You know, the flip side works too. If you had that bar gold and you just lost it, like, you know, you accidentally threw it in the trash and it ended up at the bottom of the dump. You still have title to it, but it's, you know, in the bottom of the landfill somewhere. That doesn't do you too much good either.
Starting point is 00:15:27 So, you know, the deficiency in a lot of the existing solutions for Bitcoin passing it on to someone in the event of your demise is they don't consider both parts of the picture because people are either going to a lawyer and that's where they're ending it and they're not thinking about how that loved one is going to get their keys, right? So in other words, your will or your trust
Starting point is 00:15:48 or whatever your estate plan is that you have set up, that's going to make sure that the person that you want to get title to your Bitcoin gets title, which is critically important. But if there's not a protocol in place where they're able to get a hold of the keys, it's not going to do them a ton of good. The flip side is the one that Bitcoiners really struggle with.
Starting point is 00:16:08 You'll sometimes hear a lot the idea like, well, I don't need any of this fancy stuff. My wife and my kids know where my keys are, so when I'm gone, they'll get my Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, that sounds great, but except for the fact that they, you know, you haven't gone through the appropriate legal process for them to have clear title.
Starting point is 00:16:25 And if you don't do that, first of all, they could end up suing each other to try to record, your loved ones could end up suing each other to try to recover Bitcoin from each other, saying that they were really the ones that had the entitlement to it. Even if it doesn't happen at the first generation, it could happen multiple generations down the line because you don't have that paper trail of valid title passing down. So, I mean, even, and I don't say this in any sort of a negative way,
Starting point is 00:16:52 I said this with all respect, but even if you fancy yourself like a cypherpunk that doesn't, you know, believe in these systems, you don't have to believe in them. you don't have to be interested in them because they're interested in you, right? That's like the old-fashioned way of phrasing it. So if you want to take care of the people that you really care about and love, you really got to handle both sides of this. So what we did is part of the inheritance protocol.
Starting point is 00:17:15 You know, the inside baseball of how this all started is actually at least mildly interesting. When I first started thinking about this, I was like, you know, my side of this, the legal side as a lawyer is not, I mean, it's very, very important that you get it done and we can provide some basic advice on this for people how to seek out an attorney and how to get these documents drawn up. But it's actually in certain ways the easy part. The hard part is coming up with a protocol that is both secure while you're still alive with respect to your keys while still making it seamless for the people that need to get them
Starting point is 00:17:48 after your demise to get those keys. And that's when I, you know, on shame, we have this great concierge team led by Phil that, you know, even before they got into the inheritance game, their whole deal is helping people deal with their keys. I mean, that's one of the most important things concierge does. So it just struck me immediately. It's like, this seems to me to be predominantly a concierge issue. And I talked to Phil about it. And like, he just did an amazing job picking up the ball, really ramming home this protocol, the drafting, all the hard work of really getting this together as a product. And it's something that we could get out in a valuable way to our clients
Starting point is 00:18:23 was very much on his side of the ledger. And with that, you know, I'd love to just pass it over to Phil for a second to talk more about the keys aspect to it, the actual possession and how that works. Well, thanks, Jeff. That's super kind of you. On our concierge calls, I would say the number one question we receive is, how do I ensure that my loved ones have access to my Bitcoin if something happens to me? And in particular, my non-technical, non-bitcoiner loved ones, like we might be hardcore bitcoins, but maybe our spouses or family members, they support court us but don't necessarily understand, you know, multi-sig. That's the primary point that we really tried to solve. Secondarily, it's how do I do this today without divulging my Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:19:11 balances or creating single points of failure in either like an executor, trustee, or a loved one. Again, we kind of go back to this idea of single points of failure. If somebody has the keys, all of the keys to your Bitcoin, they're holding your Bitcoin. They can see how much it is. And then the third point is really, how do I do this so it's not like a really technical Rube Goldberg machine affordably, simply. And that's really the three questions or the three problems that we tried to solve with this first edition of our inheritance protocol. And most of the magic comes from using multi-signature.
Starting point is 00:19:50 So a multi-signature address is a type of Bitcoin address constructed by multiple keys. Keys are required to build it, required to spend it. In our situation, we use a two out of three multi-signature Bitcoin address. What's really nice about multi-signature is when done correctly, again, it eliminates all single points of failure. But what that means in practice is that a single seed phrase no longer can cause somebody who has that seed phrase to find or spend your Bitcoin by itself. So, you know, we've seen a lot of over the past few years, a lot of, like, you know, hacks where phishing emails will go out to people and it'll say, hey, enter your seed phrase here. And it's somebody who ends up stealing their Bitcoin. Now, the reason that works is because
Starting point is 00:20:39 it's a single signature Bitcoin wallet. In single signature, if you have the seed phrase, you have the Bitcoin. Multisignature just like really separates that idea of a key from the directions to your Bitcoin. I like to call it the treasure map. So in Multisig, you need to have keys plus your map in order to find the Bitcoin. But as a result, you can safely give one of the keys to an executor or trustee today. And with one key, again, they can't see how much Bitcoin you have. They can't spend the Bitcoin. They're just holding one piece of the puzzle. And that's, that's really the foundation. Now, the protocol itself is really just a series of letters. So we have a letter that you can give to an executor or trustee today. It says, hey,
Starting point is 00:21:31 I'd like you to help me out holding a key to my Bitcoin. It's not a single point of failure. You know, if you lose it, just let me know. We'll rotate it out. But please protect it. You will need it in the event that something happens to me. The other thing that we give folks is an actual seed phrase in a tamper evident bag with another letter, only to be open. in the event that something happens to you. Now, the second letter has a few more pieces of information. Hey, I was working with a company called Unchained. This is a key to my Bitcoin wallet.
Starting point is 00:22:00 Please get in contact with them as soon as you are legally able. So you still might have to go through probate cord and wait for all that legal stuff to be cleared out before you can actually get on a phone call with us. But as soon as you're legally able to, you can hop on a call with Unchained will help you walk through the recovery process. So yeah, the first edition of the inheritance protocol really is focusing on solving that possession issue. And now what we also do provide is a series of questions and estate planner questionnaire that you can use when you're evaluating estate planners and figuring out whether you want to
Starting point is 00:22:34 have a will or whether you want to have a trust, whether you like that person that you're actually interacting with. So we do have some resources there as well, but primarily this edition is helping solve what Jeff mentioned, which was the possession side of the equation. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world. many of them operating on the front lines of history.
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Starting point is 00:26:46 Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Talk to us about the term probate versus non-probate assets so that people understand what that means. Yeah. So, you know, the, the, the, the, the, probate is the traditionally court supervised process of transferring title from a deceased person to their ultimate beneficiaries. That's sort of the best way to put it. It's actually set up primarily to protect creditors, because they get paid before all your beneficiaries, of course, and anything else. But that's traditionally how it works. But because it is set up, primarily to protect creditors, it is very public in the majority of states.
Starting point is 00:27:40 And for bitcoins with substantial Bitcoin holdings, they may not want the fact that they have substantial Bitcoin holdings to end up in the public record. Because probate records, they're not a public record as in the type that gets published in the legal notice as part of the newspaper or everything is in the tiny print. Typically, it's not going to end up in there, but it is in a government office that if someone wanted to, they could walk in and ask for a copy of it and pay a $15 photocopy fee or something and get a copy and find out what assets you had, right? So because of that, a lot of people choose to, as part of their estate plan, use something like a revocable living trust or other similar
Starting point is 00:28:21 mechanism that removes the assets out of the probate system and then causes them to be passed down, you know, to the next generation through a private process. It's still a legal process. It's just typically what I would call a non-court supervised process. It only ends up in court in the event someone files a lawsuit. Whereas, you know, with probate, even if you're in a state with a streamlined probate process where you don't have to go to a court in a traditional sense, there are still public filings involved. Got it. Talk to us. Oh, go ahead, Phil. Did you have some else? Yeah, just to reiterate this point, like there's two points that Jeff has made that really, like, I myself, I would call myself a bitcoins first and foremost and very, you know, just learning
Starting point is 00:29:05 about the legal side of the equation here. But the two points that Jeff brought up that really stood out for me in this entire process, was this one that, hey, if you don't do anything, then and you die, like your entire Bitcoin balance is going to be public record for all of your descendants, right? So whoever ends up getting the Bitcoin, you've now docks their entire stash. And then on top of that, if you haven't done a will or set up a trust correctly, like, those descendants could be suing each other. So it's like all of their Bitcoin could be public record and they could be going through a, you know, arduous legal battle. And so for me, it just was like a wake up call. Like, I need to get on this immediately, figure out the title.
Starting point is 00:29:52 And yeah, it doesn't matter really how cypherpunk your setup is, how technological it is. Like, if you still live in the U.S. or while you die or your family lives in the U.S., it's going to happen. All this core process is going to happen. Yeah, and what's really wild, too, to the docks and point, Phil brought up in most states, so not only will your Bitcoin balance be in the,
Starting point is 00:30:15 or at least a rough approximation in the public record, but your beneficiaries' names and their home addresses are in there. So that is not the best op-sec, obviously. Hmm. Fascinating points there, guys. Talk to us a little bit about IRAs. Break it down for us. I think most people are, you know, they're used to the traditional versus Roth discussion, but talk to us a little bit about checkbook IRAs. I know that's something that you talk about, Jeff. Explain what that term means and just kind of give us a one over the world on your just opinions of IRAs. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, that was a big part of what I did before I actually came. to Unchained was, you know, I was an attorney specializing in a lot of ways in alternative IRAs. And Unchained actually purchased my IRA product back then. And that's how I ended up here at Unchained. So this is an issue, you know, sort of near and dear to my heart. You know, in those days,
Starting point is 00:31:14 you mentioned the term Checkbook IRA. If someone wanted to hold Bitcoin in an IRA and for all the reasons we talked about at the opening of the show, they didn't want, you know, those keys to be held on an exchange or some sort of other Bitcoin custodian or whatever the case might be, the only way to do it back then was through a checkbook IRA, which was a type of IRA where you put in, basically slapped an LLC in between the IRA custodian and the underlying investment, which was this, in this case, Bitcoin to shield the underlying investment from the custodian. So instead of the IRA custodian custody in Bitcoin, the IRA custodian just custody to an LLC, and it was the LLC that actually owned the Bitcoin. But typically the way
Starting point is 00:32:02 you would do it is you would name the IRA account holder as manager of the LLC, and as a manager of the LLC, they were the person that was entitled to actually have control over the keys to the underlying Bitcoin. I have probably, it's, have set up over a thousand of those over the years as an attorney. Eventually, though, what happened was just a little bit over a year ago, November of 2021, a tax court decision came down called McNulty. It was McNulty versus Commissioner of Internal Revenue. And the ruling in that case, without getting too far into the weeds, through a lot of cold water on the checkbook IRA structure.
Starting point is 00:32:42 The court, you know, IRAs are required to have a custodian under the statute that enables IRAs, Section 408 of the Internal Revenue Code. And the court basically came up with this idea that, if the custodian didn't have involvement in the underlying investment that was underneath that LLC, that it wasn't real custody. The whole thing was effectively a sham and it wasn't an effective IRA structure. I'm paraphrasing to make good radio here, but I wrote an art, if you really want to read the nerd explanation about it,
Starting point is 00:33:16 we have an article that I wrote on the Unchained blog that you can go check out. What's it called, Jeff, just so I can have a link in there. If you put, it's the only one with McNulty in the title. It's something like what Bitcoiners should know about the McNulty case. We have no other McNulty related blog posts, thankfully. Jeff also has an hour long webinar where he goes into agonizing details about the Monty case. I'll have a link.
Starting point is 00:33:41 For people who are into the retirement inheritance side of Bitcoin, I think it's an excellent watch. I'll have a link to that too. I'll go find the video and we'll have that in the show notes as well. I believe it's linked in the blog posts. Oh, it is. Okay. Yeah, you should be able to grab it pretty easily there. But anyway, yeah, so that threw a lot of cold water on this structure.
Starting point is 00:34:01 Now, admittedly, the McNulty case is like really poorly reasoned. The judge in the case clearly didn't really have a strong understanding in IRAs, because they are a very highly specialized area of the law. I'm an attorney in a CPA, so I am what you would probably call a tax lawyer, right? But my, you know, I sort of like, what's the, the Bain quote? Like I was born in IRAs. You merely adopted them, right? So a lot of, you know, tax lawyers, if you don't have a lot of experience in IRAs,
Starting point is 00:34:30 it can be very opaque to you. Just like, if you were to ask me, you know, very arcane questions about international taxation, that's not my wheelhouse. That's not really what I do, you know, international stuff. So I wouldn't have a good answer. So it's not a reflection on how smart somebody is. just like what their particular wheelhouse is. So as a result, because it was only a trial court opinion and like I said, it wasn't
Starting point is 00:34:54 honestly all that well-reasoned, there are certain providers that have just chosen to ignore the case and keep offering their continuing checkbook IRA structures to Bitcoiners. That's definitely a thing that's still out there. I don't advise it only because I'm a conservative guy. I don't want to be the test case for the next guy that the IRS comes after. You know, the McNulty case was not specifically about Bitcoin. It was actually about goals. Oh, interesting.
Starting point is 00:35:18 But I don't want to be the guy that the IRS decides to flow to trial balloon on, right, to see if we can extend this holding over and make it work for Bitcoin as well. So what we did here at Unchain is we tried to design our IRA product in such a way that our customers could get the key control that they want and that also provides them that security that their Bitcoin is actually there, right? Because that's what you need to know more than anything else, your Bitcoin's really there. While at the same time, you know, meeting this sort of enhanced definition of custody
Starting point is 00:35:53 that the McNulty court sort of whipped up, you know, for the first time, it was the first time most of us had ever heard about it and was sort of a departure from earlier checkbook IRA cases in the late 90s and early 2000s that had, you know, been in the tax courts. So the way we did that is our IRAs are not checkbook IRAs. There is no LLC in the middle between the, IRA custodian and the underlying investment. You know, that LLC prevents the IRA custodian from actually seeing what's going on,
Starting point is 00:36:24 which is what I think distressed the court a lot in McNulty, understandably, because the IRA custodian has no way in that case of reporting, you know, tax abuse to the IRS. If I were the IRS, I suppose that I would not like that either. So what our structure does instead is we title an IRA vault in exactly the same way than an IRA at the most plain, boring vanilla legacy financial institution brokerage would be titled. For those of you who have IRAs that, you know, Ameritrade or Fidelity or Schwab, go pull up your statement. You'll say it doesn't, you'll see it doesn't have your name on it. It'll actually say,
Starting point is 00:37:02 if it's TD Ameritrade, for instance, it'll say TD Ameritrade clearing for the benefit of Jeff Van Drew IRA. That's the way IRAs are titled. And what that means is that TD Ameritrade has legal title, the actual coins, and the IRA account holder has what's called equitable title. And what that in layman's terms means is TD Ameritrade has to have vision and some level of understanding of what's going on with the asset, but the ultimate owner, the person for whom everything's benefit has to be, is that account holder, the guy whose name comes after the for the benefit of. So if you open an IRA with us and Unchained, we are going to take a person. We are going to title it exactly the same way as a legacy financial institution to try and stay as conservative
Starting point is 00:37:50 as possible. But the secret sauce where we're able to give you key control so that you know no one can take your Bitcoin away from you is we, every one of our clients enters into it what's called a tri-party delegation agreement with the IRA custodian. The IRA custodian agrees like, hey, I'm the custodian over these coins, but I delegate the keys to you and unchained. And our IRA custodian and unchained is Salara National Bank because IRA custodians by law have to be effectively either a bank or a trust company. So they act as custodian, but they're legally delegating key control, both to, you know, just like any other unchained ball, two keys to the account holder to, you know, obviously secure appropriately. And then one key to unchained
Starting point is 00:38:39 to sort of act as a backup key. The second thing that's really important to the structure, besides just the titling and the fact there's no LLC involved is based on the way that it's structured, unchained and the IRA custodian have eyes on that ball. And if you're a hardcore Bitcoiner, that might sound scary. But in the context of an IRA, that's exactly what you want. Because Mrs. McNulty lost her tax benefits due to the fact that her custodian had no way, no vision on those assets, didn't know what the investments were. That was the whole turning point in that case. So by giving us that, we know, hey, you move coins out of your IRA vault, you have the entitlement to do that because they're your keys. It's just going to get
Starting point is 00:39:24 reported as a taxable IRA distribution, just like it's supposed to be. So really the goal here is to sort of thread that needle, do everything in a tax-compliant way while still giving you control over your keys. All I heard was Bitcoin's better than gold. Yeah, I'd like to just add on a, a few things that Jeff said. So Unchained IRA, not a self-directed IRA. So I actually worked with Jeff before Unchained purchased keykeeper IRA. And I set up a self-directed IRA for myself to hold the keys to.
Starting point is 00:39:58 I had an old 401K that I wanted to roll into Bitcoin. And the process of setting up the LLC was very difficult and arduous. And then on top of that, every year you have to like fill out these documents that you then have to like physically mail. It was just kind of a headache. There was a lot of like reporting requirements. What's nice about this structure is you're, you're not dealing with legal entities that you are responsible for reporting for. Unchanged just kind of takes care of that side of the equation. And then yeah, like threading the needle through the McNulty stuff is really nice because legally this IRA looks very plain. It's just like any other IRA. Jeff, I'm glad. At the end of the day, you have
Starting point is 00:40:40 the keys. Jeff, I'm really glad that you told me it was a gold case because a lot of that wasn't making sense to me until there at the end and you're like, yeah, they can't audit the vault. They can't prove how much gold is sitting in that vault where with Bitcoin, it can literally just look at the public address and they can see that everything that's been deposited into that address is still there. Exactly. And that was a big part of like the court's rationale was So what Mrs. McAnulty did is she put the gold in her safe with, I believe it was a post-it note on it that said like, this belongs to XYZ LLC. And one of the factors the court brought up among many was the fact that, well, I mean,
Starting point is 00:41:23 anything, that gold could have gone anywhere and the custodium would have had no idea. They were just relying on the fact that, you know, she was saying it was still there. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's a very different situation, right? There's a publicly auditable blockchain. Part of your IRA account agreement with your unschained IRA is you agree that you're going to keep your IRA Bitcoin in this vault, right? And if it leaves that vault, that's a distribution. So everything is very above board, which in the context of an IRA is exactly what you want, right?
Starting point is 00:41:54 You don't want no KYC Bitcoin in an IRA. The whole point of an IRA is you're getting tax benefits in exchange for following a set of rules that you have to be able to prove, you know, to the government. So you said you didn't want to talk about international tax law. So my next question takes us, I know a little, just enough to be dangerous. Talk to us about Bitcoin legal tender international. So we have El Salvador. Have you guys heard of legal tender laws kind of popping up or other countries around the world kind of looking to adopt similar?
Starting point is 00:42:31 I have heard about them. the United States actually at the state level. So states, individual states have the ability to do that. I don't know if it'll pass. In Florida here, our next legislative session is in March, and there's a proposal to make Bitcoin legal tender here. It's nice. I mean, how much, you know, what difference does it make on a day-to-day basis? I'm not exactly sure. But. Well, from a tax standpoint, wouldn't that be a huge deal down there? Not really. It just means you'd be able to like pay your taxes and your, DMV registration, I guess, in Bitcoin if you wanted to. But it wouldn't change the tax effects
Starting point is 00:43:08 of it. The fact that it's like, let's say it's legal tender in Florida, it doesn't change the current IRS interpretation of the law that Bitcoin's property and not currency. So that wouldn't make too much of a difference there. The fact that it is legal tender in El Salvador, not everyone agrees with me on this, but I think it actually does make a difference under the uniform commercial code. It moves Bitcoin from being what's called a general intangible to being money. It doesn't matter to you at all if you're listening to this podcast unless you're in the world of finance and you care about things like lending and perfecting security interests. But I don't think that's going to matter very much soon anyway because the newest version of the uniform
Starting point is 00:43:52 commercial code that states are starting to adopt, hopefully rapidly, has an entire, I wish it had an entire new section on Bitcoin, but unfortunately, you know, they have to be neutral, so to speak. So it has a section on virtual currency, which is a slightly less odious term than cryptocurrency. That's the one I really hate using. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer.
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Starting point is 00:47:40 From a legal policy standpoint, how do you see things progressing? I know there was some big news recently that I know Ethereum was almost going to be bucketed with Bitcoin as far as being a commodity or being viewed optically as a commodity. And it looks like that has been reversed. And now it's just Bitcoin that's going to be viewed as a commodity and everything else is going to be a security. What else are you hearing? And what do you think is important to filter out a lot of the noise? What is the signal that's happening since FTX? You know, from a legal perspective in terms of what your listeners would really be caring about, probably not too much.
Starting point is 00:48:20 I mean, it's the bigger thing I think is just that what we talked about at the top of the show. And that's just realizing the importance of not your keys, not your Bitcoin. And that Bitcoin is just not a re-hypothicatable asset the way other assets are, not that they should really be re-hypothicated either. On the legal side, I mean, if you're a nerd like me, you know, following the bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware is probably going to be fairly interesting because we've never had anything quite like this before. I had all kinds of goofy, salacious details are going to come out in the bankruptcy if you're interested in that stuff.
Starting point is 00:48:53 Like, I don't know. I think we found out a couple weeks ago that FTX owed like some obscene amount of money to Margaritaville casino. You know, just like goofy stuff like that. But I think that's most of what you're going to see. And then the big fallout is going to see going to be like who gets dragged down by this. You know, we've obviously already seen that this hasn't been limited to FTX, right? They've brought, unfortunately, other companies down with them. And I say unfortunately, because I don't want to ever see anybody lose their job. But, you know, we may not be done.
Starting point is 00:49:27 There may still be more to come here, companies that are sort of still hanging on by a thread, but won't be able to do that much longer. That'll probably be the thing to keep an eye out for. And for God's sake, if you have your Bitcoin still on an exchange, get it off. Get it off. Get it off. to do so. Get it off.
Starting point is 00:49:47 Put a squeeze on these exchanges. Get it off. Another thing that we were talking about a little bit earlier in the episode is just the scale of FTX. So I actually got into Bitcoin around the same time as you guys after the Mount Gawks collapse. And I just remember any news article would cause the price of Bitcoin to spike by tens of dollars.
Starting point is 00:50:09 Which were big moves, which were really big moves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were celebrating. But now we have, you know, FTCS, we have Tom Brady, we have Matt Damon, you know, it's at, it's like the celebrity kind of pop culture level. What I could foresee happening is certain, you know, legislation or government's encouraging, okay, well, now we need like, we need our banking sector to hold Bitcoin because they're the responsible ones.
Starting point is 00:50:36 They're going to be able to custody client funds. But I think the problem with Bitcoin is that the model of a centralized, like third party custodian just doesn't work. Like no company ever has to be a single point of failure for Bitcoin because we have tools like multi-sig, which are just built into the network. So I think we're going to see a lot of the same things just at an increasingly large scale. The other thing I think about is like the central bank digital currencies that these foreign countries are starting to think about and the Federal Reserve is starting to think
Starting point is 00:51:05 about. It's like, guys, we've already seen what happens when you air drop stellar. Like we're going to see the same thing with the digital. X, Y, or Z currency, I think. So I just think it's kind of interesting to see the scale at which all these things are occurring at this point. To Phil's point there, too, I recently spoke on a panel at the Florida Bankers Association. And because of the way those guys think, one of the first questions they asked me is, like,
Starting point is 00:51:33 well, what about CBDCs? Aren't CBDCs going to, like, kill Bitcoin? And what I told them was, like, CBDCs, like, it's not even competitive with Bitcoin. That's just like that's like saying PayPal would kill Bitcoin. You know what I mean? The CBDCs aren't even really interesting, frankly, because like we have digital dollars now. People for the most part aren't walking around.
Starting point is 00:51:56 Some people still do, but aren't walking around with huge amounts of cash. Your average person is spending digital dollars on their credit card and then paying that credit card bill over the internet with digital dollars from their bank account that they never physically see in their entire life. And the CBDC, if anything, just like cuts out visa. So who cares? Like, you know, that is nothing to do with Bitcoin. That's, I view that is an interbanker fight or squabble that, you know, I have no stake or interest in. Yeah, I feel like the ironic thing about CBDCs is if they, if, if a central bank actually releases one, all of the private banks are going to have to compete with that. Because like now people can just get an account with the Federal Reserve or whomever. And how do the private banks compare? compete with that service, well, there's this thing called Bitcoin out here that works totally
Starting point is 00:52:45 differently. So I view CBDCs is like kind of an admission of defeat and it will accelerate Bitcoin adoption because in order to stay competitive and relevant, these larger banks are going to have to start offering Bitcoin to their clients. Yeah, if anything, I think you can make the argument that the banks are going to help us prevent CBDCs from happening, which is not a bad thing, right? Yeah. The direct attack on their business model, right? Yeah. The thing that CBDCs is are most comparable to is postal banking. Are you guys familiar with that? No, talk to us about it.
Starting point is 00:53:18 So in some countries, I believe Japan is one of the, I've never been to Japan, so I'm just going by things I've read here. I believe Japan is one of them, but there are others. You can just get like, what we would consider basic retail banking services, like your checking account and your debit card, right? You can just get that at the post office for free. So like you could get like a post office checking account and a post office debit card. So banks basically lose that business unless they're providing some sort of enhanced or premium service above that very basic level of service. So that's the first thing I thought of when Phil was talking about how it hurts a portion of their business model and they'd have to start trying to offer other things to compete with the CBDC. That's what I think
Starting point is 00:54:00 it's, I think it's just like basically postal banking for the 21st century. Yeah. And when we talk about like So what does the stable coin bring? It brings immediate clearance for a lot of these exchanges that are doing these derivative products and all that kind of stuff. Like they need to have immediate settlement. You can't do that with the legacy rails. That's the whole reason the stable coin market has just exploded. And when we look at a central bank digital currency, I think they're from a Federal Reserve
Starting point is 00:54:30 or any other central bank, they're going to try to make the argument that, well, we're just going to do what all these stable coins are doing and then we're still going to have control and we're not outsourcing this to some private company to potentially have the funds or not have the funds in their treasury that are backing each one of these units that they're issuing. And the surveillance aspect, right? That's the thing. Then they'll have perfect surveillance without having to rely on subpoenaing somebody else. Which is the scary part.
Starting point is 00:54:57 And that's why we, you can't find a single Bitcoiner that's ever going to want a central bank digital currency for the surveillance aspect that comes with that immediately. token. But, you know, like we said earlier, the banks might help prevent that from happening and maybe the stable coins that are being issued or I don't know. But my, you know, Preston, you just touched on something. Like, as soon as you start learning about Bitcoin and you understand, you know, how Bitcoin isn't controlled by anyone, there's a fixed supply of 21 million. Here's how the blockchain work. Here are your keys. Like, nothing that a central bank digital currency can offer you is going to be something that you're interested in. Yeah. So as these
Starting point is 00:55:36 banks are, you know, going to have to offer Bitcoin services alongside maybe their CBDC. People are getting educated and then they're realizing, oh, wait a minute. Like actually, I don't want the central bank digital currency. I just want to hold the keys to my Bitcoin. So, yeah, it's, I don't know. I think it's like the game theory of it, I think is pretty funny and interesting. The thing that I think about, you know, and I know when you say the term hyper-bitquinization, it gets very theoretical.
Starting point is 00:56:02 The thing that I think about with the stable coin piece is you go back to like 1920s, Germany, and the prices were moving so quickly that the physical paper just couldn't even possibly keep up. And when I think about a potential scenario where, call it, credit markets start melting down and you're seeing prices constantly changing in stores and people were trying to pay with digital funds, like there needs to be some type of immediately clearing fiat currency to bridge that transition to a Bitcoinized world where we have these 21 million units that are out there that are bringing calm and stability to a global economy that's being totally
Starting point is 00:56:44 wrecked by these policies. So, like, there needs to be something that allows that immediate settlement, because as, as we trend more towards this, like, the velocity of changing from the old system to the new system, I think is going to pick up pace. It's not going to slow down. And I don't know what the right solution is, but it's very fascinating to see all these, like, solutions for Fiat to meet the speed of Bitcoin or to try to step up to the same pace that Bitcoin, the frequency that Bitcoin's moving at, it's just kind of fascinating
Starting point is 00:57:21 to sit here right at the tip of the edge of this thing and seeing everything materialize. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on any of that. I have a thought. Just this idea of stable coins, I think, is a really, it's a misnomer in a lot of ways. There's a lot of misnomer in Bitcoin and general crypto, but stable coin for me is a really bad one because it's like, we know, as Bitcoiners, we know that the dollar is not stable. I mean, look at inflation this year. It's double digits on a good month.
Starting point is 00:57:51 And so the dollar itself is not stable. And then on top of that, these stable coins are issued by centralized parties. So you have to trust them. And they're the ones managing the issuance and they're managing the actual dollars. So you're actually adding a ton of counterparty risk on top of something that isn't stable to begin with. And then you have these like defy crypto bros trying to do algorithmic stable coins. It might as well just be called a turkey coin, right? Like at some point they just all are going to explode.
Starting point is 00:58:23 And I think we can expect that honestly from all of the quote unquote stable coins that that exists today. I don't think there's a single stable coin model that will survive indefinitely. So I just really caution people to be careful with these stable coins. Like even the ones that look buttoned up today, like, yeah, I don't know. Anybody who's sitting on that, you know, like what kind of risk that's involved in that? I mean, FTX looked buttoned up like a month ago, right? Like the Miami Heat basketball arena had their logo on the roof. Right.
Starting point is 00:59:00 It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. But I think the message for people listening to this is you've got a fractional reserve system that nobody has any clue how many units are there. And they're constantly manipulating how many units are there. And you're putting it against a system that is fully auditable at any moment in time. And it's very easy to know whether somebody has what they say they have or that they
Starting point is 00:59:26 don't. You can verify it very easily. These systems are very incompatible with each other. And almost like you're watching a race where you've got two runners and they've got to pass the baton, like we're going from this old legacy system and the baton has to be passed over to this system that is just in stark contrast to the way that things have operated. And I just don't know how that handoff is going to really necessarily materialize itself, but I do really, I fully believe that the handoff has to happen and it has to happen in some kind of way that, and I just hope that it's being constructed in a way that minimizes the risk and the damage to the most amount of people, limits the damage to the most amount of people as possible.
Starting point is 01:00:11 Yeah, I think the first decade or really the first kind of few happening cycles of Bitcoin, we saw a lot of financial companies founded that are essentially like copying and pasting, the legacy financial system onto this new model, into this new paradigm. Now, in the last few years, what we're starting to see is more and more companies starting to understand Bitcoin in the protocol itself and starting to use the tools that are baked into the money in order to create new types of services that wouldn't be possible with the dollar or with any other fiat currency. So when I hear of something like FTX or these crypto lenders that are going under, it's like, well, they really just tried to copy and paste the legacy financial system onto something that they didn't understand. There are companies out there that I think do understand the critical differences between Bitcoin and really any other currency.
Starting point is 01:01:12 And that's where the signal is amidst the noise. Guys, let's go back to kind of close this out to the inheritance planning and retirement planning. what are the biggest mistakes that people make in this? Like if you could really kind of lay out, like you guys deal with people all day long, what are the biggest mistakes that you see? The most classic, and this mistake,
Starting point is 01:01:36 like you could talk to a guy who's been practicing in this area for 80 years and doesn't know what Bitcoin is, and he would actually tell you give you the same answer I'm about to give you right now, is people just assume they're not going to die tomorrow. And as a result, like estate planning, getting your will, your trust, everything else, all those important documents squared away with your lawyer,
Starting point is 01:01:58 it's the easiest thing in the world to procrastinate, right? Because it's just not human nature to believe that we could die tomorrow. Even if we all think that we're going to die, yeah, I'm going to die eventually, but not tomorrow. So I can put this off for an extra week. And unfortunately, you don't know when that day is going to come. So it's not at all a good idea to procrastinate on this stuff. Phil? I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to talk about private keys. So taking this a different direction. I've seen pretty much everything there is to see when it comes to people making mistakes with private keys. The first mistake is not writing down your seed phrase. You should always, always, always physically secure your seed phrase. The hardware wallet that is holding the seed phrase, it's like a $50 to $150 device.
Starting point is 01:02:49 It's not a perfect device. The devices out there that are on the market right now are very good and they are secure, but we shouldn't assume that they will last forever. Having a physical seed phrase gives you a lot of optionality. Now, if you're just holding one seed phrase and it's a single signature wallet, don't put that seed phrase on any sort of internet connected device. Don't take a photo of it. Don't save it in your cloud storage.
Starting point is 01:03:15 Keep it physical. A lot of people will maybe even stamp it into steel. there's some tradeoffs there. Steel is a very kind of conspicuous item compared to maybe a piece of paper that you can hide a little bit better. With multi-signature, which I think is really the best way to secure Bitcoin because it eliminates all single points of failure. The biggest mistake I see with multi-signature is using a passphrase with each key. So you have the ability to add your own word to your seed phrase, and that's called a passphrase. The passphrase becomes a single point of failure. If you didn't write your past phrase down correctly,
Starting point is 01:03:52 you capitalized a letter wrong, you added, you know, a period or a space somewhere that you maybe forgot, you're now holding a different key. So really we're where I would say our own worst enemies when it comes to self-custody, I think multi-signature with keys distributed isn't very technical, isn't very challenging, but it has the most redundancy. So yeah, I think the biggest issues I see with self-custody is just like people going crazy with passphrases and then either not writing their seed phrase down correctly or not understanding the importance of the seed phrase. The seed phrase is your key.
Starting point is 01:04:31 The key lives on a device. The device helps you use the key. To Phil's point, seed phrases have a fault tolerance because there's a limited dictionary of words. So if you miswrite the word a little bit on one of the words, you're going to be okay. like you'll eventually figure out which one that was supposed to be. That's not the case with a pass phrase. That is not from a limited, that is a very low fault tolerance.
Starting point is 01:04:56 You basically can't mess that up at all. One of Phil's guys, if I'm telling this story wrong, Phil, let me know on the concierge earlier this year, dealt with a client that I think with a passphrase couldn't read his handwriting. Was that it? And luck, he really lucked out because I think one of the guys on the concierge team just happen to be able to read it or figure out what he meant. But, you know, that was very, very lucky. This guy would have lost a lot of Bitcoin had he not lucked out that way. I've seen one capital
Starting point is 01:05:28 letter capitalization be the difference between zero Bitcoin and three digits worth of Bitcoin. Like, passphrase, I think passphrases are nuclear technology. I personally wouldn't recommend them I would recommend multi-sig, which does a better job of what we want our passphrase to do, which is eliminate the seed phrase as a single point of failure. Guys, this was awesome. And this is stuff that's really, really important for people to go back and review and think about because everybody has their own setup, has their own solution in place, and just hearing about how I don't want to call anything foolproof, but this is an amazing way to go about this
Starting point is 01:06:11 and to think about it. And at a time like what we just saw in the amount of people's lives that just got wrecked because of the trust in exchanges and just really not understanding what it is that they actually possess and handle, it's a good time to re-cage and reset. So I thank you guys for making the time to come on and talk about this really important stuff. Anything you guys want to highlight or point people towards? Thanks for having us on.
Starting point is 01:06:37 I will let Phil do the shilling part of the evening because he's the best. Phil is the best guy at shilling Bitcoin. I think I know. Take it away, Phil. You're referring to Shill Geiger, I assume. Yeah, so I'm Phil, Geiger, Phil at Unchained.com is my email. Phil underscore Geiger on Twitter. Yeah, come reach out, reach out to Unchained.
Starting point is 01:06:59 We can help you really across the board with your Bitcoin financial services. So starting from this foundation of multi-signature, collaborative custody, you have as many keys as possible for the service you're taking. We help you in these different contexts, personal retirement, business. You can use your Bitcoin as collateral for a loan. You can buy Bitcoin from us. You can set up your Bitcoin in an IRA. Remember that old 401K you forgot about?
Starting point is 01:07:21 You can turn that all into Bitcoin. And that's what we're here for. We have this new inheritance protocol that we just released because while maybe our competitors are in bankruptcy, unfortunately, or are adding support for other cryptos, we're thinking about how to secure your Bitcoin dynasty for generations. Gents, thanks for the awesome interview. Preston, thanks for having us. Have a good night, everybody.
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