Microstrategy's $91 billion infinite money glitch is
beginning to go global. A company in Asia has stolen
Michael Saylor's Bitcoin playbook to buy over 1700
Bitcoin and has sent its stock soaring 4800% in the last 12
months. However, this company in Asia is
not the only one employing this tactic.
There are now hundreds of companies buying Bitcoin for
their corporate treasuries all around around the world.
This global Bitcoin speculative attack movement is accelerating
and man 4800% that's a 48X in 12 months.
That's absolutely crazy. Today, joining us on the show we
have Nick Newman. Nick Newman is the CEO of Casa
and of course, my boy Opti, my legendary Co host in the Co host
seat Opti. I mean this is absolutely crazy.
Before we continue the conversation, let's let's some
of what we're talking about. Let's check out the Yahoo the
Yahoo finance article Bitcoin hoarders stock source 4800% in
Japan on crypto rally and of course, what company am I
talking about Shout out to our boy Dylan Leclair.
It is metaplanet absolutely slaying the ripple effects of
U.S. President Donald Trump's pro
crypto agenda are fueling a surge in Bitcoin demand in Japan
where one what hot dealers pivot to stockpiling the
cryptocurrency is delivering eye watering returns for
shareholders. I mean, you never see this.
This is unheard of and it's crazy because I think when
Michael Saylor started his Bitcoin accumulation strategy,
the the total market cap of MicroStrategy was sitting at 1
billion and currently when it reaches all time high, it was at
100 billion. It's like 100 X the market cap.
Seems like every company that's adopting Bitcoin is starting to
yield the benefits of it. Anyways, the article continues
to say shares of Metaplanet Inc are up around 4800% over the
past 12 months, the largest gain among all Japanese equities in
that period. I mean, that sounds very
familiar, right? What was the bet?
What was one of the best performing stocks of 2024?
It was micro strategy and one of the highest globally according
to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bitcoin itself hit a record of 1
of $109,241.00 on January twenty 20th as Trump was sworn in for
his second term. Although it's sense erased some
of these gains as his trade policies fanned global
instability. Metaplanet is one of a number of
outfits around the world that aim to emulate the success of
Michael Saylor's strategy formerly known as MicroStrategy.
The Tyson Corners, Virginia based company has morphed into a
leveraged Bitcoin proxy and a behemoth after accumulating more
than 45 billion of the token. Metaplanet's CEO, Goldman Sachs
equity derivatives trader Simon Gertrovich, said he was drawn to
the idea after hearing about sailors strategy on a podcast.
He'd been running Metaplanet, formerly Red Planet Japan Inc,
as a hotel developer since 2013, but shifted to a quote Bitcoin
first strategy in early 2024 after a pandemic slowed down for
slow down forced the company to shutter all but one of its
hotels. Since then, Metaplanet
shareholders have increased to almost 50,000, growing by 500%
in 2024, according to the company.
Shareholders include Capital Group, which also invest in
strategy, but the vast majority are retail investors, many of
whom have limited experience with volatile crypto assets.
Quote Metaplanet has such high exposure to the volatile retail
base, it goes on to say quotes. They need to make sure
shareholders understand exactly what their strategy is.
I think. Just just my personal opinion
here. I think they know exactly what
they're getting into. And I mean, this is absolutely
crazy for a company you can make a very strong argument for was
essentially a zombie company. Essentially, the pandemic was
really, really rough to this company.
They pivoted. They followed the MicroStrategy
playbook. And just like MicroStrategy,
Metaplanet really isn't a hotel company anymore.
It's like a Bitcoin holding company and it seems like they
have first mover advantage in Japan and anyone who bought the
share is up 4800% if you bought it at the bottom.
Absolutely crazy. Here's another article by
Coindesk. Metaplanet follows MSTR's lead
announces a $11.3 million debt sale for additional Bitcoin
purchases. So it seems like this infinite
money glitch phenomenon is happening worldwide.
People are looking at what Michael Saylor is doing with
strategy. They're copying Michael Saylor's
strategy and it seems like their stocks are benefiting from it.
And it's not only in Japan. Saylor actually tweeted this
this morning. Jet King is India's first
publicly traded company to adopt the Bitcoin standard.
He mentions the CFO explains why in the interview below.
And it's about a 42 minutes, a podcast or interview where the
CEO of Jet King explains why they're adopting a Bitcoin
strategy. I would not be surprised
whatsoever if their stock started going parabolic as well.
And it seems like all these companies like they're
forgetting their core businesses and they're just, they're just,
they're just becoming Bitcoin holding companies.
But I think the the question that is on everyone's mind is
how long until companies like Google, companies like Amazon,
companies like Facebook or better said, Meta?
Take a look at. You know, these crazy
performances by these companies like Strategy and Metaplanet and
they say, you know what, it's probably a good idea to get some
just in case this thing catches on.
I think there's, I think they can only resist for so long
until their shareholders revolt, in my personal opinion.
I mean, we already had news coming out of Amazon, coming out
of Meta that specific shareholders were basically
saying, hey, you guys should take a look at this Bitcoin
thing. And of course, we had the famous
video from Michael Saylor where he had three minutes to make a
presentation to Microsoft, basically making the case as to
why they should adopt Bitcoin. And the TLDR of that video is
Microsoft, you should have topped, you should adopt Bitcoin
and you're going to have fun staying poor, which I thought
was absolutely hilarious. But it was a master class by
Saylor because what he was able to condense in 3 minutes, he
just packed so much information there.
Anyways, I'm going to pass it on to Nick.
Nick, I mean, you're the CEO of a, of a, of a Bitcoin company,
man. So we are here at simply so I
think you know the benefits of having Bitcoin on your treasury.
It is a literal cheat code that I think most of the world hasn't
awakened to yet, but it seems like the public markets are
starting to get a taste of it, and it seems like their stocks
are performing because of it. Nick.
Yeah, totally. I mean, and it's kind of funny,
I didn't realize that Metaplanet was a a hotel company before.
It's like they they pivoted from being a hotel company to being
Hotel California for Bitcoin. You know, they, they want
Bitcoin to come in and never leave.
So I think that it's interesting to see these different types of
companies. You know, I think Jack King is a
education company, Metaplanet, the, the hotel company,
Microstrategies, the, they've got all the business analytics
and, and so it's these different types of core businesses, but
from, for one reason or another, they, they maybe were stalled
out on the business growth. And so they decided to pivot to
take advantage of the growing Bitcoin standard, right?
And that is something that gives you more treasury access and
more treasury strength to then go build the rest of your
business in a way that you have a a core advantage because
you're using this better money asset on your balance sheet.
And we've seen that for our business, you know, we hold a
ton of our balance sheet at Casa in Bitcoin and and that's been a
huge benefit to us over the years.
And so all that comes, we don't have access to the public
markets, right. So we're not going out and doing
the financial engineering that sailors doing, but we accept
customer payments in Bitcoin, right.
And so we just don't sell the Bitcoin that we get from
customer payments. And over the last five years
that's built up into a pretty big stash of Bitcoin that has
been really beneficial for us from a treasury perspective.
So I think it's a huge benefit to companies, whether they're a
Bitcoin startup or a large public company transitioning
into Bitcoin, huge benefits from having Bitcoin on your balance
sheet. Absolutely.
And and especially to like, you know, Nick, I wouldn't consider
you guys a start up at the at this point.
But if you're a start up and like, you know, if you're just,
you're just getting going like it's crazy having you know,
20-30, forty, 50% of your treasury in Bitcoin and your
runway gets bigger. That that is a very surreal type
of you're looking at that you're like, no way, this is real.
This, this can't be real. This is, this is fake.
Because so many startups are used to, to burning the runway,
right? And you're like, you're managing
that going down. And with Bitcoin, it can expand
and it can act if you do it right.
You know, you, you didn't, you ideally didn't want to buy all
your startups Bitcoin at 69 K before it crashed down to 20,
right? But if you are doing it right,
then it can provide significant runway expansion to the point
where it's like you did another fundraise as a startup.
Absolutely. Yeah, it's, it's it's an
absolute cheat code. And I think the public markets
are starting to get a taste of it.
But it's it's interesting which companies are doing this right.
Like Michael Saylor has said himself in previous interviews,
like, I would have retired. I don't think MicroStrategy
would have been competitive. Like this thing wouldn't have
existed. And it's very similar.
When you hear about this meta plan, it's like no one really
knew what this company was. It was a hotel chain.
The hotel chain was about to go out of business.
And they look at Bitcoin. They're like, hey, you know what
like this is, this is a good opportunity.
It's, it's fascinating to see what Bitcoin has done to these
companies that, you know, potentially you can make an
argument wouldn't have existed 2-3 years from now if they
remained on a Fiat standard. Not only has Bitcoin given them
new life, they've made them the best performing stocks of the
year. And these companies don't really
like, look, I love Sailor. I, I like, I like strategy.
I still don't really know what strategy does, right?
I, I know that he buys a lot of Bitcoin with strategy and I know
he, I know there is a software behind it.
I, I know that. But I don't think a lot of
people know what his core business is.
And his core business makes revenue and makes money.
It's real. It's not that it's, you know,
it's fake or anything, but people don't really kind of buy
MicroStrategy because of the core business.
People buy MicroStrategy because of the Bitcoin that.
He's especially now that he's doing the, the more financial
like really leaning into financial engineering, right?
So when he first started, he was buying Bitcoin mostly with his
business's profits, right? And so that he had smaller buys
on a regular basis. But then he figured out the the
cheat code where he figured out he could go to market with
either the at the market sales of his stock or putting out
converts and just buy huge amounts of Bitcoin in the market
just keeps eating it up. And so he's really, it doesn't
even matter what micro strategies core or strategies
core businesses like now, he's just a Bitcoin treasury company
basically. Absolutely 100% and I think I
think companies worldwide are are figuring that out too.
Opti, what's your take on this bro?
How was your weekend dude? My weekend was great.
Thank you for asking. Well, first of all, I I want to
I want to comment on the the Yahoo.
Well, really it's a Bloomberg article that was reposted on
Yahoo, but I really like the framing that they have there.
What was it? Bitcoin hoarder stock goes
absolutely nuclear like just as Bitcoin hoarder stock that I
think that sums up perfectly kind of the mainstream
perspective on Bitcoin. You know, we call it hodling.
You know what, however framing you want to call it, but they're
they're calling us hoarders and it really has a negative
connotation. Obviously they'll probably be
talking about the same flood lines we get all the time.
You know what, what do they always say about Bitcoin?
Like there's no yields, there's no cash flows to it, there's no
intrinsic values. Why would you be holding this?
And and they're kind of making us seem like we're just like,
you know, collecting some Chuck E Cheese token over here, even
how they framed it in in the article, but you know, millions
of this token and it's really interesting to see them kind of
wrap their heads around it. I would say it's most likely
because they want to frame this in a negative direction, but I
absolutely love this title. Bitcoin hoarder stock soars
4800% like it. The cognitive dissonance that
I'm seeing in this title is absolutely, and it's incredible
here because you can tell they either know their audience
doesn't understand Bitcoin and they don't really understand the
strategy, but they're also kind of downplaying the fact that
bitcoins, you know, going nuclear and making companies
become even more profitable. But like Nick was saying, I
think the interesting part about this is this idea that so many
of these companies on every actually global corporations
right now, a lot of them are essentially like zombie
companies. And and you, Nico, you were
bringing up the idea of sailor even said it himself.
He's like, I was going to retire micro strategy or now strategy.
It wasn't really doing anything, you know, I was on my basically
my, my last nerve here wondering what I should do, scratching my
head. And then I found Bitcoin.
And I think this is also just a, a perfect summary of what it
means to become a bitcoiner. You, you know, you learn about
Bitcoin, you kind of come in and it's a speculative thing.
You kind of get interested about it.
And then once it finally clicks, you change everything about your
company, everything about your life.
And you're like, Oh my goodness, this Bitcoin thing is absolutely
the best thing ever. I need to get as much of it as
possible. So it is very interesting to see
these you, you could argue maybe smaller corporations that are a
little more nimble, that do have founders that have control of
their company being able to pivot and just be like, look,
yes, I was a hotel business. Yes, I was a business analytics
company. But now I am turning my company
into basically a Bitcoin bank like I just acquired Bitcoin and
and it's going to make my stock go absolutely insane and my
shareholders are going to be super happy about it.
So I find it very interesting. One, of course, the Yahoo title
will rather Bloomberg title here and this idea that once you
start to understand Bitcoin, you kind of have to reevaluate
everything about your core business and if you're capable
of obviously just turn it into a Bitcoin business.
But it's also kind of a testament to what a lot of
Bitcoiners in our chat always talk about.
It's like, look, I, I just, you know, I mine Fiat and I save it
in Bitcoin and my life gets that much better.
If, if we all were corporations, you know, like Sailor, like the
metaplanet CEOs, you just fundamentally change your whole
core business to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible and your
shareholder value is going to go crazy.
So hey, will we see, will we see Tim, Tim Cook do the same thing,
not making any more iPhones and he's just going to stack as much
Bitcoin? Ever, ever.
All companies worldwide, they just stopped producing products.
We're just going to pivot to buying Bitcoin.
Well, I wouldn't want to see that.
I I like Apple products, but you know, it's kind of interesting.
I mean, I think what's it's interesting like is, is that
sustainable, right? Is it sustainable for more
companies to just become these Bitcoin acquisition vehicles?
And I think probably no, I think that realistically you'll get
one to two Bitcoin acquisition vehicles per public market
region that really gains the mind share.
So it's, it's kind of a jurisdictional or like
geographical play, right? Like strategies done this in the
US and then similar scientific is maybe like the next biggest
one in the US, but it's a huge gap between the two.
And then Metaplan, it's gone and done this in Japan, Jet King's
doing this in India. And I think that you like, once
you've got that vehicle, once the public market investors have
that vehicle, that's the one where most of the money is going
to flow towards. And then it's unlikely that
you'll just see a bunch of other public companies purely pivot to
this Bitcoin treasury company strategy because I don't think
the market dynamics will work in the same way.
And so then the rest of the companies, what they're going to
be doing is they're actually going to be using Bitcoin more
strategically to accomplish the goal of their underlying my
business. And so then it's like, how can I
use Bitcoin as a treasury asset to keep building the product
that I want to build, but do it in a more advantageous way?
And I think that's where the real like widespread adoption of
Bitcoin as a treasury asset will come from is those types of
companies. Less so everybody trying to copy
Sailor because eventually that runs out and after you tap all
the different geographies. I, I know, 100% agree, because
if you do like the a little bit of math, right, like the amount
of cash that Apple or Google is sitting on and the amount of
purchasing power they're losing on a yearly basis is a
ridiculous amount. That money could be, you know,
allocated to R&D or marketing or like all, you know, all these
things like that. It's like a melting ice cube.
I mean, Sailor has said it himself, right?
And with that additional capital, think about it's, it's
not only additional capital, that capital is actually
increasing and purchasing power every single year.
It obviously allows you to, I think as, as we felt as as
Bitcoin, you know, company entrepreneurs and stuff, It
allows you to invest some of that capital back into your
company to make your company better rather than the existing
Fiat system where it's, it's, it's terrible.
It's like, it's like an additional tax.
So the taxes that you're already paying, right?
So, yeah, I, I think that this phenomenon, I think what's
happening with strategy and Metaplanet, I think it, it's
essentially taking advantage of the system.
And I I, and that's why the, the stocks have exploded as, as as
much as they have. But like you, like you said,
Nick, I don't think the long term, I don't think the party is
going to continue forever. I think they're, they're
obviously fulfilling a market need.
There's a lot of companies that can't legally get exposure to
Bitcoin ETFs or spot Bitcoin. So they obviously buy strategy
instead. And I think a very similar
phenomenon is happening in in in Japan as well.
So anyways, guys, before we start the show, we have tons to
talk about today. Specifically, there's some
interesting things that were happening and Coinbase, the
amount of money that has been lost to social engineering scan,
it's an absurd amount, over $300 million.
Zach XPT wrote a great thread about it and our friends over at
Casa, we're talking about it as well.
And then during the news segment, I find this very
interesting. We're going to be talking about
where Bitcoin belongs in your retirement plan.
And again, just as we've been talking about how Bitcoin is a
cheat code, if you put it on your treasury, that applies to
your personal finances as well, like Bitcoin is a cheat code.
It's pretty crazy. So we have all that content left
for you guys. We have a hell of a show, but
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I also want to give a shout out to the 1700 of you guys watching
live between YouTube and X and the 100 or so of you guys
watching live on rumble. If you guys are enjoying the
show so far, smash the like button on YouTube.
We just broke 100 likes. Help us break 150 likes within
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guys watching live on YouTube alone.
Smash that like button. At the time of recording the
Bitcoin price is 97,280, Block height 800, 83,197 sats per
dollar 1028 market cap 1.93 trillion Bitcoin versus gold
market cap 9.5% Percentage issued 94.39% Decline from all
time high -10.9% Realize monetary inflation 1.01%.
In the grand scheme of things, we are just getting started
Anyways. Nick pointed this out to us in
the beginning of the show. We were originally going to
cover something different, but then Nick pointed this out to
us. I'm like, we have to cover this
because this is absolutely crazy.
And remember guys, we are huge advocates of self custody.
The entire show is essentially telling you to take self
custody. The partners who we choose to
partner with enable you to take self custody of your Bitcoin.
And again, one of the one of the easiest and fastest way to get
your essentially your, your Bitcoin rugged by leaving it on
an exchange. And the exchange doesn't even
need to be hacked, right? You could just be social
engineered or your e-mail address is hacked and then
hackers get access to your exchange and then they just take
out all your Bitcoin. This is why cold storage is so
important. But it's not just cold storage
you got to you got to take cold storage properly.
And there's many different ways to do that.
And we're going to talk a lot about that during the culture
segment today. But anyways, let's get into the
thread by Zach X BT Over the past few months, I'm I imagine
you have seen many coin base users complain on X about their
accounts suddenly being restricted.
This is the result of an aggressive risk of aggressive
risk models and Coinbase's failure to stop its loser, its
users from losing 300 million per year to social engineering
scan that is, that is absurd. That is a crazy, crazy, crazy
crazy that that's a lot of money.
ANYWAYS, myself and another person by the name of Tang Kui
42 spent time reviewing Coinbase withdraws and gathering data
from my DMS for high confidence thefts on various chains.
Below is a table we created which shows 65,000,000 stolen
from Coinbase users in December 2024 through January 2025.
Our number is likely much lower than the actual amount stolen as
our data was limited to my DMS and dense we discovered on
chain, which does not account for Coinbase support tickets and
police reports we do not have access to.
He goes on to say. Let's walk through how these
Coinbase social engineering scams work.
A victim reached out to me last month after losing 850,000.
That's Oh my God. Graphing out this theft led to a
consolidation address with 25 other victims tied to Coinbase.
Huddle dot ETH goes on to say the scammer called the victim
from a spoofed phone number and use personal information
obtained from private DBS to gain their trust.
After they told the victim their account had multiple
unauthorized login attempts, they sent.
They then sent a spoofed e-mail which appeared to be from
Coinbase with a fake case ID for their gaining trust.
They instructed the victim to transfer funds to a Coinbase
wallet and whitelist an address while support verified their
account. Security scammers clone the
Coinbase site nearly one to one. Allow the scammers to send
different prompts to the target via spoofed emails using panels.
There are many Telegram channels where scammers advertise them.
See examples of various panels used by scammers below.
Last year I posted multiple examples of Coinbase user
thefts, all for millions of dollars.
The two main groups conducting these scams are Skids from the
COM and the Threat Actors located in India, both primarily
targeting US customers. The other month, a Coinbase
employee told people on X to stop using VPMS to avoid being
flagged as suspicious. Meanwhile, threat actors will
explicitly block VPNs from phishing sites and not use them.
This shows Coinbase's failure to diagnose the actual problem, and
it continues. Now I know Nick, you guys
reacted to this over over you, you reacted to this personally
and I know lap reacted to this. This is your this is one of your
posts and you made a video about it as well.
Today, Zach XPT shared research showing that at least 65 million
in crypto has been stolen in Coinbase social engineering
scams in just the last two months.
The main point in in your security is you.
What do you mean by that? And what can people do to
protect themselves from these types of attacks, Nick?
Yeah. So the first of all, this was
crazy to me that so much money had been stolen from people on
Coinbase and that they still haven't really done something
about it. And so this is like Coinbase has
a a very trusted position in our industry just due to the number
of people that use it. And so this that makes them a
huge honeypot. And this is a a huge problem for
them if if they're losing $300 million plus per year, right.
And and that's just an estimate of probably the lower end of the
range. So Coinbase needs to be doing a
better job about this. But self custody is one of the
best ways you can protect yourself against this.
And we'll go in, we'll go into that.
But when I say that the in my tweet that the main weak point
in your security is you, what I mean is that a lot of times
these people are giving access to their Coinbase account to the
social engineers, right? And so they've got somebody
calling them who who has some information on them that the
victim thinks, Oh, it would have to be Coinbase if they know this
about me. That's not true.
Like somebody, your addresses, your phone numbers, your e-mail,
all that stuff is out there for people to find.
And from one of the many hacks, right, like AT and TS been
hacked how many times? I don't know.
So all that stuff is out there. So somebody calls you and they
say, hey, I'm with Coinbase. There's a problem with your
account. Let me give you some information
that I've stolen from somewhere else on the web.
And this is going to trick you into thinking that I'm from
Coinbase and here to help you. And they really rely on scaring
you like they get you into this state of, of anxiety and fear.
Oh, is there actually something wrong with my, the funds in my
Coinbase account when there there isn't anything wrong with
it. And then they, they'd walk you
through this whole script where they eventually trick you into
basically sending them the Bitcoin.
It's not even, but often times they aren't even like taking
over your account. Sometimes they figure out how to
take over your account directly, but a lot of times they are
actively tricking you into just sending your Bitcoin to them.
And so this is where I get to like the main weak point is your
in your security is you, right? If you let yourself get into
this state where you're worried about losing money, you give up
all of your logical kind of processing power and suddenly
they have full control over you. And so the best thing you can do
in these scenarios is one, don't answer the phone to an unknown
number to start with, But two, if you think that this, there
might be something fishy here or Coinbase is calling you or
whoever it is, Casa is calling you, whoever it is like, just
take a step back and say, whoa, hang on a second, is this real?
Maybe I should take a breather here and let your your logical
mind come back a little bit. Yeah.
And I think I think they also prey a lot on on people that
perhaps are a little bit older and they're used to getting
those types of calls from their banks, right.
And, you know, they sound super legit.
And it was it was it was actually really interesting.
Nick, I was going to say funny, but interesting is the better
word. You actually answered one of
these calls yourself and you recorded it, which I thought was
hilarious is a terrible word because it's all this money is
being stolen. But I think it was, it was, it
was, it was interesting that, you know, one of the leading,
you know, Bitcoin security company CEOs picks up one of
these scam calls. What, what, what was one of the
things that you experienced is that you noted from, you know,
from, from the scammer. I mean, I highly recommend
people go in and watch that because it gives you so much
insider info as to how they pull off these scams and how they
trick people, right? It's on my Twitter profile and
it's the pinned tweet and it's a 14 minute video and it's
entertaining and kind of a sick way, honestly.
But it's also very educational so you know what to look out
for. The one of the things that I
took away from it though is they are looking for very easy
targets. The name of the game for them is
cold call hundreds of people a day, find the easiest possible
target for them to to hook fast and then move on to the next
one. And so it's all a volume game.
So if you are just slightly more difficult than the next person,
they will hang up and move on, right?
And so if you just take that breather, you can get them to to
move on and, and not mess with you in that instance.
And so that's one of the many things that I, I think I took
away from it. But it's we're actually, I've
attempted this a couple of times, right, to record these
guys when they call me. And the first time it, I was
following along with them as they were sending me the spoofed
e-mail from Coinbase. The the text confirming that,
you know, they were a Coinbase representative and I saved all
this stuff. And we're actually, we're going
to publish a second video soon. That is well, that first one was
more about like this guy kind of bragging about how they do all
this stuff. The second one is actually me
going through the steps to get social engineered and then
stopping at the point where I thought, oh, this is where they
could actually steal anything that's in my account, right?
And then calling him out and trying to get him to talk about
it. And that's when he hung up.
But up to that point, you know, I've got all the things like
they sent me this e-mail, they sent me this text message.
Here's what the guy's saying. And so we'll have more of that
stuff coming to help people just educate themselves because
that's what you got to do, right?
You got to educate yourself to know how to protect yourself.
And like you said, this isn't just a problem for for Bitcoin,
right? Like this happens with older
people with their normal bank accounts all the time.
I was talking to a friend of mine who works at a bank and he
said that they have problems with us where you know, some
elderly person will get social engineered with their bank
account and then they've got maybe a day to try and reverse
that payment or it's just gone. So it's a big problem and and
honestly, this is one of the things that self cost that the
right type of self custody helps to solve.
Yeah, absolutely. And again, self custody comes
with a lot of responsibility. And I think that there is like
a, there is a, a mental shift that people I think are going to
have to go through, you know, over the next decade or so as,
as, because it's not just self custody of, of, of, of your
money. It's, it's, it's your identity.
Also, it's your digital identity.
And I think, you know, as we transition from the analog era
to the information era, it becomes even more important.
Like people don't really understand the significant
because it comes with the pros are freedom, the pros are
autonomy, the pros are sovereignty.
The cons is there is no one 800 number to call if you get
hacked. There is no one 800 number to
call if your seed phrase gets exposed for whatever reason,
there is no 1800 and then not. And I, I want to save this
conversation for the, the culture segment.
But if like for whatever reason, people know that you're taking
self custody of your Bitcoin, how do you protect yourself from
$5 wrench attacks, right? How do you take advantage of,
of, of playing, of keeping your seeds in different locations,
pretend potentially different jurisdictions, right, to kind of
play into your security setup. And these are very important
questions that people are not asking because they're they've
been conditioned to outsource that responsibility to a
financial institution. Now that we're heading into the
era of self custody of people reclaiming back their financial
sovereignty using Bitcoin. You got to look into multi sig,
you got to look into how to take, you know, the different
hardware wallets that exist. You got to look into the
different solutions like Casa. We're going to talk about that
during the culture segment. You got it.
You got to do that. If you want to become a
sovereign individual, you got to put in the work to become a
sovereign individual and you got to you got to put in the
research. So I think I'm really looking
forward to that second in video, Nick, that you guys are going to
come out with. I know June Seth has done a
great job exposing some of these scammers as well.
Do you want to chime in before we move on to the new side?
Yeah, well, I was just going to really comment.
I didn't watch Nick's video, but now I'm going to because the
June Seth series was like incredible to listen and kind of
get into the mind frame and, and the amount of bragging that that
you heard on those and you know, they were just very cold blooded
to say like put it lightly. And there is like a lot to learn
from this. Obviously maybe you think that
you are a super bitcoiner here and that it this could never
happen to you, but they even get people that have been doing it
for a while. And so it is very interesting to
just hear how the social engineering happens.
Obviously protecting yourself, but also kind of knowing how to
protect your, your friends and your family.
And I'm, I'm glad that Nick said that.
You know that one thing that I know I do is I just literally
don't pick up random phone number.
I don't respond to random emails.
It's like if it's there and even personally like knowing that I
have a good self custody set up, you even start to feel like you,
if you see those emails, you're like, oh, wait, did I leave
something on there? Did you know, am I actually
being at risk here? So even someone that does it
correctly, you still feel that. And then imagine if you don't
really understand what you're doing.
So it's very easily to be socially engineered here, but it
it's always, it's always very eye opening to see these or hear
these recordings and see how they do it.
And it's just incredible how much money people lose.
And that's why we constantly try to tell you guys to take things
slow, take things into self custody and really prepare
yourself. So I'm super glad we brought
this up, but that that thread by Zach XBT is crazy. 300 million
plus like. That's crazy. 300 million a
year, bro, a year, which is minimum, absolutely gnarly,
gnarly and 65,000,000 the last two months alone.
Anyways, guys, we're going to hit the news segment.
We're going to talk about Bitcoin, your retirement, how
you should custody that Bitcoin. We'll be right back.
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So yeah, definitely check it out.
I think the topic not I think the topic of today's news
segment is why Bitcoin belongs in your retirement plan.
There's a clip from legacy media and then I'm going to take a
look or share the the website priced in Bitcoin 21 and of of
course, Jimbo's calculator. When Moon given my Bitcoin
stack, when can I retire anyway? So check out the clip 30. 5% of
Americans felt like they were, that is.
Way too fast. It comes to saving for
retirement. Let's try that one more time.
35% of Americans felt like they were significantly behind when
it comes to saving for retirement.
That's according to Bank Rates Retirement Survey.
Now, one asset that you may not have considered adding to your
retirement portfolio? Cryptocurrency joining me now in
studio with more we've got Chris Klein who is the COO and Co
founder of Bitcoin IRA. Chris, great to have you here in
studio with us. Now you say that there are three
things that typically draw investors to crypto.
So let's start with asymmetry. Why is that appealing?
So just getting yourself as a potential hedge against other
problems in the marketplace. Also just getting off a zero and
having an opportunity. This is a big shift in monetary
policy that's happening. And for the first time in about
100 years from the White House, we're getting an executive
orders. They're saying, hey, this is
time for national sovereignty and for individuals like
yourself, individual sovereignty with your portfolio.
You're also looking at this as an inflation hedge.
That's part of the top three things that you're looking for
and reasons why investors tend to turn to Bitcoin for
retirement saving. Just break that down for us in
the inflation hedge that Bitcoin could be for retirement.
Savings. So it comes down to scarcity.
There's only 21 million Bitcoin that'll ever exist. 19 and a
half million of them are accounted for.
We haven't seen this kind of scarcity since the 1920s,
nineteen 30s. So to get there'll be a day
where they'll say, wow, you're A1 Bitcoiner and it'll be a life
changing experience for those folks.
Interesting and said and lastly within that volatility and
hedging against volatility, I mean Bitcoin and crypto more
broadly initially and continue to be known as a more volatile
asset. So how does having and gauging
that volatility, how does that work within a retirement
strategy? Well, you're more of a long term
thinker or as we call a long term huddlers in the crypto
space. So when you're in your
retirement setting, you're thinking 35, maybe even 7 to 10
years out. But volatility is a reality
walking in and especially this year we're going to have price
discovery. Tom Lee and others are calling
for maybe 2 hundred $250,000 for a Bitcoin.
We're sitting just around 102. So it's very interesting the way
that the the anchor freight, the the anchor kind of phrased it in
terms of, yeah, volatility, like volatility is a bad thing.
Volatility is dangerous, volatility is negative.
But if if you take a look at the data, that's why I love this
website priced in Bitcoin 21, everything, the S&P 500, you
know, even with housing prices doubling in the United States,
gold, oil, everything is down against Bitcoin, especially the
longer, the longer term view you look, you look at it like it,
it's pretty crazy. Like even the S&P is down 77%
compared to Bitcoin gold 94% a house 90% cheaper compared to
Bitcoin oil, 94% cheaper. The dollar.
I mean, we all know this. It's obvious.
And I think that leads me to my, to my next question is Nick,
what is, what is the role of Bitcoin in, in people's
retirement? What, what, how should people
look at Bitcoin and see in and see Bitcoin potentially as a
tool to, you know, live the life they want to live in the future?
And then my second question to that is how should they be
storing that Bitcoin and how, how, what type of tools are
there for them to potentially pass it on to the next
generation in terms of inheritance?
Yeah. So I think the the interest in
the the guy in the video kind of eluded or said this.
But the interesting thing about putting Bitcoin in a retirement
account is you are necessarily just taking a very long term
view on the assets in your retirement account.
And most people just have kind of an auto buy going in their
retirement account, right? Especially when you're a little
bit younger, you're not planning to retire for maybe 30 years or
so. So you just had, you're buying
indexes, right? That's, that's what people
historically have done. You just are always putting your
money into Vanguard or whatever the index is.
And what's interesting about it is like a lot of times when
you're young, you're, you're starting out, you want you,
you're taking this long term view.
And so the, the Vanguard, you know, tools will suggest, Oh,
you should have maybe 90% or more of your portfolio in
equities and that's going to provide kind of the, the best,
best return over a long period of time, as long as you're
willing to weather some of these ups and downs where equity is
more volatile. And then as you get older, it
starts to suggest, oh, maybe you should have some bonds in here
and stuff so you have less volatility.
Well, Bitcoin is, is incredibly volatile as well or has been
historically and we'll see what happens going forward.
But it's been incredibly volatile.
But for the people who have held over a long period of time,
they've had immense long term gains, right.
And so that mindset matches up very well for retirement
accounts. And then you add on the fact
that for certain types of retirement accounts, when you
actually pull the money out, it can be tax free.
All the gains, capital gains are tax free.
And so this is a huge benefit for owning Bitcoin in a
retirement account. So that's the first to answer
the first question there, like why would you, why would you
think about owning Bitcoin in a retirement account?
And then the second one is how would you, how can you hold
Bitcoin in your retirement account?
I think the most basic way is if you're, if you've got kind of a
classic 4O1K or something like that right now, your main option
is the ETF for having Bitcoin in that account.
There is also a less known type of account called a
self-directed IRA. And with this you can actually
self custody the Bitcoin that's in your IRA.
And so there's certain limits on, you know, whether you can
have that type of IRA or not, how much money you can put into
it on an ongoing basis. But for people with that type of
IRA, they can self custody their Bitcoin, which is great from a
security perspective. And for the people who maybe
have a four O 1K and don't have access to that, that
self-directed IRA or have a really large balance sitting in
a four O 1K already, and they want to move some of it into
Bitcoin, generally the ETF is going to be the best vehicle for
that, which I think is one of the the huge benefits of the
ETFs coming to market. Like whereas overall I'm a big
self custody advocate, right? That's where what we've built
our whole company around. The ETF is great for some of
these more restricted accounts like retirement accounts where
you want the long term tax benefits but you weren't able to
access Bitcoin through that before.
Yeah. And and I I agree.
And and I think the IT, it, it kind of the, it depends on, on
the situation, right. Like if, if you're an older, if
you're an older person, right, the ETF things look very, very
appealing to you. You just go log into your
Charles Schwab account, Bom, Bing bom boom, you know, you're
buying Bitcoin. I think if, if, if you're
younger, right, the, the whole self custody thing.
I, I think there, there there's like a, there's like an
ideological component to it as well.
I think a lot of us lived through the 2008 financial
crisis. We're not exactly fans of of the
legacy financial system and I think self custody is our way of
protesting. It's like a it's a very peaceful
protest. It's basically saying like,
look, I'm going to you guys could have fun with that.
I'm going to opt out of the system entirely and I'm going to
take custody of my keys. Opti, what are your thoughts
brother? Yeah.
Well, not to really rehash what Nick was saying because he, I
think he absolutely hit the nail on the head.
My more interesting take on this is the fact this is, this is
even being played on the, you know, the corporate press right
now. The fact that we've gotten to
the point in 2025 where they're talking about Bitcoin being a
form of wealth to retire on just goes to show how far we've kind
of come in this whole Bitcoin journey.
Because for a long time, anytime they talk about Bitcoin on the
television, it was always either a speculative asset or, you
know, it's for criminals, etcetera.
And now we're getting to the point where they're like, hey,
you know, boomers out there, you you might have never heard of
this Bitcoin thing and it's the way for you to retire or
obviously for us younger people and personally, you know, I
don't have an IRA or a four O 1K.
My retirement is Bitcoin. And so I am the living example
of this. But it is interesting that
they're getting this message out for more people where they're
like, hey, maybe here's one thing that you haven't really
considered. It is holding Bitcoin long term,
like we were saying, you know, 7 to 10 years out holding Bitcoin,
it will be your retirement. I, I think that is like the big
silver lining here is that we've gotten to this point now where
it's actually being taken seriously from the suits and
the, you know, the smart money out there.
They're like, hey, maybe this Bitcoin thing is something that
you can retire on for the future.
And I think that's only going to increase and probably by the end
of this year, obviously by the next cycle, I think it's going
to become very common knowledge that, hey, maybe you're going to
get outsize gains by just holding Bitcoin versus putting
money in a four O 1K or, you know, just a standard IRA and
maybe you want to go to these Bitcoin Roth Iras, etcetera.
And I think this is just how far we've come in the last couple
years where Bitcoin is legitimized now, or at least at
the very beginning of being legitimized.
That's something that you want to hold long term that you can
live on for the rest of your life and that will be there for
you when things are uncertain. Especially when you kind of look
at the outsize gains for Bitcoin compared to a standard, you
know, 4 O 1K or just holding stocks, etcetera, and all the
crazy uncertainties in the world right now.
I'm super glad we've got to this point now where they're at least
starting to talk about Bitcoin in the way that we've talked
about it. And now it's seemingly becoming
that every corporate press out there will eventually become a
Bitcoin propaganda machine. So I am super hyped on that.
Absolutely, Absolutely. Before we move on, guys, I, I do
want to show you something that's a fan favorite here at
simply Bitcoin, which is Jimbo's moon calculator.
So we'll pull it up and I'll, I'll, I'll essentially explain
to Nick what it is. Essentially, Nick, this is like
an open source like code that a buddy of ours wrote.
And essentially it's when moon a given my Bitcoin stack, when can
I retire? What what what is a fan favorite
here is people will plug in numbers, so I'll pass it on to
you. Just hypothetically, of course,
you know went what is the just for the sake of the show your
stack size in BTC. Just an example point 5.1.
I never revealed this, so I'm going to leave it at the default
one. I didn't ask you for your actual
stocks, I just just just for the audience as an example.
I don't know, let's, let's see what what's what's the new goals
here in 2025 for Bitcoin? I've been seeing what is it 10
million sets point 1.21. Should we do .1 OK?
Or maybe no, let's do .5 do half a coin.
Have someone new here, do you agree?
Are we going with half a coin that?
Sounds great, yeah. Half a coin, All right, your
desired income in today's dollars.
I mean, I'm assuming when I retire I won't be supporting
kids or anything like that and we'll won't be living like too
crazy of a life. So let's say the desired income
needed necessary income for like me and my wife is probably let's
call it 100K or something. Under K Boom.
Although with inflation by that point, maybe it's got to be a
million. It's in today's dollars.
In today's dollars. As today's dollars and then it
asks you what the annual USD supply increase, So what the
what the inflation? Rate fan favorite part.
Yeah. All right.
So what's What's the annual US inflation?
Yeah. What what do you think it is
that's that's basically the question that we always kind of
pose to the audience. We have what what's the official
numbers is right. Three percent, 3%.
We all. Think it's a little higher. 8.
8% all right. And now I think this is like the
the biggest, the biggest, the biggest factor here.
What do you think is going to be the annual Bitcoin appreciation
rate, Nick? Yeah.
So I think, I think we've got one more set of like pretty big
leg UPS from from like a big burst in adoption like at the
government level and that kind of thing.
And then it's going to become more steady.
So I would say I'd put this how long is this supposed to be?
Or it's calculating the number of days so.
Yeah, it's basically saying like, look, with .5 a hundred,
you want 100,000. The annual The annual inflation
rate is 8 percent 45. OK, that's 35 No 45. 45 Oh, I
like. That on the chat, Nico.
For I like that. OK, So the the personal moon
date for someone who has 505 hundred million, Yeah.
Is it 50 million sacks? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 50 million
sats. Your personal moon date would be
2031. That's when you'd be able to
start withdrawing from your stack.
And this is assuming also that you're not going to add to your
stack as well with it with the desired annual income of 100K
and you'll be able to essentially retire at 2031,
you'll be able to start withdrawing from that .5
Bitcoin. That's why I absolutely love
this calculator. It's a huge fan favorite.
It's completely open source. You guys could plug in the
numbers there are we? Sure this website isn't run by
the IRS well. This is why we say don't plug in
your numbers. Yeah, hypothetical numbers.
Exactly, exactly. This is.
This is all hypothetical. This is what the chat is asking
for. You know, this is all just for
the sake of a example and, you know, having fun and all that.
So yeah, guys, go check out Wen Moon.
It's a fan favorite from Simply. You drop the link in the chat,
people are asking for it. Absolutely.
And let's also let's get on to the culture and we're going to
talk about Casa and how you guys could use Casa as a self custody
solution. They make multi sig incredibly
easy. I've been recommending them to
friends and family for a very, very long time now, so we're
going. To talk about all that during
the culture segment, we will be right back.
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your success. All right, everybody, so let's
let's talk about Casa. Let's talk about all things
Casa. Like I said, huge fan of this
company. You've been been a huge fan of
this company for a very long time because I am essentially
the de facto Uncle Jim for my entire family.
And obviously I want my entire family taking self custody of
their Bitcoin. And I think Casa allows you to
do that without all of the I, I would say the UI complexities.
I think the UI is is I think the UI have a lot of Bitcoin
software for you know, I don't want to I don't want to specify
a specific demographic, but let's just say people that
aren't living and breathing Bitcoin, they aren't on Bitcoin
Twitter 24/7. They aren't consuming Bitcoin
podcast 24/7. They're just trying to get by,
you know, like my parents, like my, like my immediate family.
You know, this is the app that I recommend for them because
obviously I want them to have the security of multi sig.
But I also don't want them to essentially get so in over their
heads in terms of their setup that they can't access their
Bitcoin. Because that's another thing
that people forget about Bitcoin and security.
It's not how you can make 2 mistakes.
You can make your security so sophisticated that you yourself
lose access to your Bitcoin and then you can make your your
security so weak that you know your Bitcoin gets hacked.
You want that happy medium right and I think that's what you guys
do incredibly, incredibly well. Nick over Acosta, especially
with the UI that you guys have with the app that you guys have,
it makes it incredibly easy for someone to set up a multi sig
wallet without them really needing a lot of technical know
how it's it's it's really straightforward.
The emails that people get the you know, the the you can you
connect your Ledger, the with the with the passport.
It's awesome. Now you don't even have to
connect it to a computer. You can just do you can just,
you know, use the camera feature and scan the QR code just from
the phone. You don't even have to connect
it to a computer anymore. You guys do a really really good
job at making multi sig incredibly easy for the everyday
person that wants to benefit from multi sig security.
Thank you. Yeah, that's the that's the
goal, right? When we, when we created Casa,
we realized it was just too hard to hold your own keys.
People were doing all these crazy things to try and make it
safer. And we recognize that there is a
huge need to just give people a basic like balanced, really
robust security model where we walk them through end to end.
Here's how you do it in a well designed way and get as many
Bitcoiners as possible secure. And so it's been a ton of fun to
build over the last six years. Now we've been around for quite
a long time and I think really built up a lot of trust and in
the community for for doing a good job securing a lot of
Bitcoin. So this is something that like,
if you think about it, the main goal of what we do is just
remove single points of failure. So remove the single point of
failure of your Coinbase account getting social engineered,
remove the single point of failure of a treasure or a
mobile wallet or something like that, that could be wrench
attacked. Remove the single pointed
failure of the what happens if your house burns down, which
we've actually had happen. And so there's a lot of these
different potential things that can happen when you self
custody. And, and what we do is try to
build a a system that helps you protect yourself against all
these different things without having to put in hours and hours
of work yourself to understand and figure out how to do it.
Absolutely. And I just kind of want to walk
through a lot of this, right. So is it cost a standard plan?
And then if you compare that to like a single sig set up, right,
it protects you from accidental loss.
How? Because cost actually holds one
of the keys in the two of three set up.
So essentially you're responsible for two of the three
keys. If you lose one of those keys,
you can always go to Casa and they'll sign that transaction
for you. But I think there's a security
protocol, I think it's seven days, I believe before you guys
sign off on, on that transaction.
So again, this is like, and this has happened to me without
getting into any specifics, but this has happened to me with
family members where I set them up on Casa on one of the two
plans and they lose a key and they freak out.
They're like like I lost the key and I'm like, no, don't worry
because through the app with that that you guys have, it
actually makes replacing a key incredibly easy.
You don't really have to do anything.
You just plug in the new Ledger and it just replaces the key.
I don't know some magic is happening in the back end, but
it essentially this is, I don't want to say idiot proof, but
like you guys are making it really, really difficult for
people to lose their Bitcoin the way that the cost app.
Yeah, you gotta, you gotta mess up multiple times, right?
And so you have to like stack mistakes on top of each other,
which is, which is what we're trying to do because security's
never going to be perfect, right?
Like there, it's always this dance between the threats and
the protect and the protection against those threats.
And So what you're trying to do is just build like layers of
security and hope that if one of those layers fails, then you've
got this second layer that can still help you, you know,
recover funds, that kind of thing.
And so like AI think a good example of this is we actually
had a client whose house burned down recently and he had a key
and a seed phrase backup stored in the part of his house that
burned down. Luckily it wasn't the whole
house. It was like a segment of it.
And normally you'd be freaking out about this, right?
Because you've lost the seed phrase, you've lost the hardware
wallet, that's all of your money gone.
And what actually happened was he just called us and said, hey,
lost one of my keys, can you send me a new one?
And we sent him a new one. We replaced the key and then
he's back to full health. And so whether you're using Casa
or not, you want to think about ways that you can add these like
extra layers of redundancy and security into your overall setup
because that will make you more secure.
So like on the social engineering side, for example,
whether you're using Casa or or not, you want to make sure that
for your main Bitcoin stash that you aren't planning to do
anything with except for hold for a long period of time.
You want to make sure you can't access that immediately, right?
So even if somebody were to call you and try to trick you into
sending them your Bitcoin, you're like, hey, I got to hang
up and go drive to this other place or maybe fly to this other
place in order to get my keys in order to send you this Bitcoin.
That suddenly puts you above the threshold of like too much
difficulty. And so then they move on to
somebody else. So it's all about adding these
layers of security into your setup, whether you're using Casa
or not. Absolutely no, I completely
agree. And again like it's all about
redundancy, right. And the other plan that you guys
offer as well is the premium, which is essentially a three of
five. But essentially it really does
feel like a two of three just because the mobile key, the
signing process of it is like pretty seamless in terms of how
it feels from a user experience. But essentially you have three,
you have, yeah, you have 3 keys, hardware wallet keys that that
you want to obviously take care of.
And you have a mobile key. So one of the keys is on your
phone and it is backed up to the iCloud or the Google equivalent.
I don't know what that's called. So you can essentially transfer
it from 1 phone to the other. And then of course, you have the
recovery key that Casa holds and it's a three of five.
So you need 3 signatures out of five in order for you to spend
that Bitcoin. But what's really awesome about
this type of setup is the you could do this with the two of
three as well with the standard plan.
But you can really get very clever in terms of where you're
going to put the keys and stuff. And you guys, you know, come up
with different names in terms of there's one key in the office,
there's one key at home, there's one key in the safe, right?
And, and that allows you essentially to spread out your
keys over various locations. Not only does that protect you
from a $5 wrench attack, but that also protects you from
natural disasters. I mean, what happened in Los
Angeles recently with the fires so, so bad and it, you know,
terrible. And actually, we, we know
Bitcoiners that their homes burned down.
Like we know Bitcoiners whose homes have burned down.
So having your keys, your seeds in different, different
locations protects you not only from the like the $5 rent
attack, but also protects you from from natural disasters as
well. Like you never know, Like did
you think that was going to happen in in a very populated
part of Los Angeles? Like no one knew that was going
to happen, right. And again, it also gives you the
flexibility of losing one of those keys and not losing access
to your Bitcoin, right? So I think that's really
important as well. Now, I think the question that I
have for you, Nick, is can you talk to us a little bit about
like Casas holding one of the keys?
What can they do? What, what could you guys do
with one of those keys? I think a lot of people maybe
they like they just don't understand the technicalities of
it. And what are you doing to ensure
the security of those keys as well?
So in case someone does lose two of those 5 keys and they they
want to have access to your Bitcoin, how can they know for
certain that they can rely on you guys?
Yeah. So the first thing to know is
that Casa doesn't KYC some of the other multi sig options out
there, they KYC you as part of the overall solution and we
don't do that. So you can sign up completely
anonymously, like you can make a alias for your ProtonMail
address if you want to, you can pay us in Bitcoin.
So we don't have any information from credit cards.
Like you can be as private or as not private with us as you want.
And that's we're following the law completely by doing this
right. And so we have really built our
business in a privacy first way. So you can first know KYC with
us and then second, how do we use that key?
Well, one of the the interesting things is like, all right, we
haven't KYC Ed you. So how do we make sure that it's
actually you requesting this key?
And part of the way we do that is we build in time.
So at our standard plan, if you request that key, you're going
to answer some security questions and then it's a seven
day wait before we sign the transaction or approve the
transaction with our key, which still is just one of the keys
that you need. You're going to have to bring
some amount of your keys, right? So at the standard level, it's a
seven day wait. At the premium or above level,
it's a 2 day wait. And instead of a, a security
questions, we actually do a video call with you to make sure
you're not under duress. You know, everything's OK.
And you actually did ask us to, to use our key to help you move
Bitcoin. So this is we built all these
kind of security procedures around here to, to keep it
private while also keeping it very secure to use that key.
And then the second thing you're asking about is just how do
people know that we've got that key secured?
And while I don't go into like the specifics of how this key is
secured, it's backed up in multiple geographies offline,
you know, and it's never been on the Internet.
It's not a hot key, it's a total cold key that requires a person
to actually go and use it. And so we've put all these all
the best possible protections around this key to make sure
that you've, you have, you can count on Casa, right?
That being said, let's say something were to happen to the
Casa key. We've designed Casa in a way
that you are not actually reliant on Casa being around or
being able to sign with our key or anything like that, right,
Because it's just one key out of your multi sick, you hold the
majority of your keys. And so we're removing single
points of failure and that includes Casa ourselves.
So that that's a bit about the Casa key.
And I think it's, it's an important part of people set up
because they know they can count on us, but it's also a really
critical part of the inheritance set up.
We use that to help people's beneficiaries actually recover
Bitcoin in case they pass away. And so that that additional like
kind of trusted security point with us has been really
beneficial for people using Casa.
And let me ask you to let me ask you another question, Nick, that
perhaps isn't obvious to the audience.
By the way, shout out to the 2700 of you guys watching live
right now, 450 of you guys watching live on YouTube,
roughly 100 of you guys watching live on Rumble and 2256 of you
guys watching live on X. If you guys are enjoying the
show so far, smash the like button.
Nick, I think second to final question is what happens if Casa
disappears? Can people still access their
Bitcoin wallet? Let's say you guys go out of
business for whatever reason or you know, there's a regulatory,
you know, like last year, you know, with operation Choke .2
point OA lot of us were feeling a certain way about running a
Bitcoin business in the United States, in the United States,
right? So can people still sovereign
recover their Bitcoin wallets? Yeah, of course, this is one of
the best things about using Casa, right, is, is sovereign
recovery. They're your keys, you're
holding the keys. So all you do is take, we give
you a file that's it's called a wallet descriptor file.
But you copy paste this bunch of text, you go over to Sparrow or
or your your multi sig wallet of choice that you want to do
sovereign recovery with paste it in there.
Boom, there's your wallet, there's all your Bitcoin.
And then you use the keys that you have in order to to move the
Bitcoin out into and into a setup that's not Casa related.
You know if something happened to Casa overnight.
And so this is one of the most important parts about not not
relying on Casa as a single point of failure, right?
We always want to make sure that you can take your Bitcoin and
exit Casa without us being in the middle at all.
And so we've built a lot of pieces of the app around this,
right? So As for example, you've got
the mobile key in the Casa app and you need, you need to have
that seed phrase from that mobile key as part of the
sovereign recovery setup. But let's say Casa servers go
down overnight. We've actually built an offline
mode in the Casa app where you can go in, open up the Casa app,
it'll know it can't talk to our servers.
But that key is on your phone. And so you can just hit export
on that key, get the seed phrase for that key, and then plug that
into Sparrow as one of the keys in your multi sig.
So we've done a lot of work to make sure that this is very
recoverable in case something happens to Casa and that you can
still always access your Bitcoin without us being in the mix.
I love that. And I just want to like kind of
summarize a lot of things that you said, right?
No KYC very important completely sovereign recover, meaning you
don't have to go through the Casa app in order to access your
Bitcoin. And it also also functions as a
fail safe like God forbid you lose one of your.
I mean, this is been doing this for nine years.
I've seen everything that I'm Nick.
I'm sure you're in the same situation.
Anything that you think could happen with custody and just
dealing with individuals, like people lose their seeds all the
time because they don't put as much significant.
They think it's just a piece of paper or they think it's just a
piece of metal. And then they value the, this is
the most common thing I've noticed.
They value the hardware more than the paper.
They don't realize the the the seed words is your money.
And then they're like, Oh, I still have the hardware, but I
forgot the pin like, Oh my God. And then it's like, do you have
the paper? It's like, no, like this.
This is where you want redundancies.
You want, but you want you want to give space for people to make
the mistake because if you're on a single sig setup and you make
that mistake, it's gone. There is no, it's over.
And and there's there's horror stories of people basically
saying like I have one more pin attempt.
I don't have the seed words and I have one Bitcoin on there.
I have 10 Bitcoin on there. That's like life changing.
We, we just, we just did the Wen Moon calculator .5 right?
So, yeah, it's so many redundancies.
And I think it's a really, really useful tool for people
that perhaps feel a little bit intimidated by, you know, the,
the, the, the UI of a lot of these wallets.
Or perhaps you're just an OG hodler.
This is a great redundancy tool to have to add to yourself
custody set up on the way in becoming a sovereign individual
man, you got to look at all the tools that Bitcoin has given
you. And one of the things also to
Nick, that perhaps people don't understand is you guys built all
of this on top of the existing Bitcoin protocol.
This you guys aren't doing anything like, you know,
anything separately that this is all built on top of Bitcoin.
And what you guys did is you guys improved the UI
dramatically to so that people can access it without perhaps
feeling a little bit intimidated.
Right, Yeah. And I think it's worth
mentioning like you don't just have to forget your PIN for the
single sig to to go wrong, right, Like you can.
We've seen hardware wallets break more often than you would
like. And so that's something that is
like the screen just stops working and maybe you have your
PIN but you're not able to access the hardware.
And then if you don't have the seed phrase, then you've lost
all your money. I think it might be worth it to
like do a rapid fire. There's been a few questions in
the chat and I can go through and like rapid fire answer those
as we wrap up. Go for it.
OK, so. Yeah, just comment and I'll pull
them up. Yeah.
So one guy asked any data breaches on their end?
No, we haven't had any data breaches.
And to protect yourself against that kind of thing, we recommend
like if you're worried about that, use a, use a special
purpose e-mail that doesn't have your name in it.
And then, you know, all that shows up is this kind of random
e-mail and any sort of data breach, right?
And then the rest of the information we try to get rid of
as quickly as possible. So for example, if you are
getting an onboarding package from you, we'll send you the
onboarding package and then delete your address so that
we're not holding people's addresses in our database, which
is was a big thing that we learned from the Ledger breach a
few years ago. Right.
So somebody, OK, somebody mentioned my Casa
representative. Brian is awesome.
Can confirm, Brian is awesome. One of the somebody said, hey,
why do I need to use Casa if I could do this myself?
And I can't find the exact comment here, but the reason to
yeah, there we go. So if I, if I can do sovereign
recovery, why do I involve Casa at all?
And it's because the sovereign recovery is there for when, if
things go badly at Casa, right? But then we've built all these
other things that you can really only get through a service
provider like Casa while Casa is is doing fine.
So yes, you can go set up a Sparrow wallet with the same
kind of underlying security of Bitcoin multi sig, right?
But what Sparrow's not going to give you is an advisory team
that helps you whenever you need it, like.
Brian, who will get on a call with you and actually walk you
through how to set this up. It's not going to give you an
inheritance feature where you can make sure that your family
members can actually still access your Bitcoin in case
something ever happens to you. Asking your family members to
try and figure out how to use Sparrow is like you know they're
mind blown, right? And so knowing that they have a
a really simple way to use it and actually somebody on the
Casa end to walk them through everything, give some people a
lot of Peace of Mind and then there.
There's two late, late the the two latest questions, Nick.
So Nick, do you have any specific signing device upon
setup so typically? So it depends on the plan that
you're at, right? But if you're signing up for a
standard plan, you can bring any of the major hardware wallets.
We support Trezor, Ledger cold card Passport, and then we also
added support for UB keys, which are are really easy to use and
we're the only place that's doing that right now.
And so this is you can bring kind of any of these major
signing devices with you. And then you can also, if you're
signing up for a premium or a private client plan, we just
send you a box that has all the hardware that you need.
And you can talk to our team at the private client level and
request that we send you custom ones like, oh, I want to make
sure I have a cold card in here kind of thing.
This last question from Craig, are all Casa features available
in the UK? Yes.
So we're available globally because we don't KYC and because
it's a self custody wallet, that's one of the benefits of
self custody, right. So if if you are using Casa, you
can use it from anywhere in the world.
There's only really like one thing that's not available
globally, which is what we call enhanced verification for
inheritance. And this is just where we'll
actually have a couple of extra steps to verify that a client
actually passed away. But that starts to to kind of
tiptoe into KYC area anyway, where if you want to take
advantage of that, you got to give us some extra info.
So we have to go and actually make sure like we've checked
against the death certificate and all that kind of thing.
We we have a really good question here from JH, which is
how can I, how can we feel confident that seed phrases
aren't leaked from a bad actor doing an update on these apps
went online. Yeah, good question.
So we have a very robust internal process for actually
like pushing updates to the Casa app, right.
And so the Casa app doesn't have your seed phrase sitting in it.
The seed phrase is actually stored on your phone, encrypted
by the secure element. And so the that phrase is never
getting sent to Casa servers. But let's say something went
wrong and the Casa app was hacked or whatever and somebody
got access to that seed phrase. You still have one, maybe up to
three keys that you're holding that are separate from the Casa
app on hardware that's completely offline that you need
in order to move the funds. And so even if the worst case
scenario happened in the Casa mobile app was hacked, you don't
lose your money because that Casa mobile app is not a single
point of failure. So this is when I go back to
like, what are those layers of security that we've built in?
This is an important one. Not every private key that you
are using with Casa should be generated online by Casa, right?
And that's that's where the hardware wallets come in.
Gotcha gotcha. Anyways, we are getting to the
top of the hour of the show. Do you want to give a shout out
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guys. Shout out to the YouTube
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audience. If you guys enjoyed the show,
smash the like button go check out Casa dot IO slash simply
today. I do want to thank our guest
Nick Newman, the CEO of Casa for joining us, a legendary Co host
Optimus Fields. Guys, we love you all, smash the
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