Author: erickim

  • How Not to Envy Other People

    I don’t really envy anybody else on the planet, I prefer myself.

    How does one begin to not envy other people?

    First, Zen. A lot of these rich successful famous people, have no Zen no peace of mind, no good sleep.

    Even the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about one of the virtues that people want to have is really good sleep. I think this is a good virtue. 

    Second, join team bitcoin. Imagine if you had like LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant all playing on the same team, all playing for a team bitcoin. Whenever they score you score!

    Now some people might think, they’re putting up 100 points and I’m only putting up 10 points. But this is besides the point. Every time they score you score!

    Everyone wins together? 

    So then this becomes very fascinating because it becomes a positive feedback loop; rather than being envious of the gains of others, instead, you began to be grateful and happy that the gains of other GOATS directly benefits you!

    Physicality and fitness

    I think one of the critical things to understand is love these guys on steroids, yes everyone is on steroids, LeBron James, Steph Curry, your favorite sports player who doesn’t even look like they’re on steroids. Essentially the big idea here is that steroids are broad; Even people who have to use the typewriter for living often get steroids injected into their carpal tunnel area, in order to ease the pain.

    For example, a lot of individuals then, get some sort of cortisol shots, which is actually steroids.

    Now what is the downside of steroids? Your balls shrink to the size of tiny acorns, you lose your sexual libido, your dick gets smaller.

    So when you see the guy who can deadlift like 100 times more than you, or has the physique of a demigod, assuming that they’re not ERIC KIM, rather, “I pity the fool!“.

    Why?

    I think the seeds of envy is based on the premise that other people are in a happier, more superior, more beneficial, more awesome position than you.

    But once you figure out that in fact, they’re actually in an inferior position than you, your opinion changes. You start to feel compassion for them. Their suffering.

    For example, probably the most interesting thing I learned about the Walter biography on Elon Musk is that you do not want to be Elon Musk. It is more of a curse than a blessing.

    For example, Elon has a very very poor physiological approach, and he also seems quite foolish. He’ll party until 4 AM, drinking Red Bull and vodka, only having to take Ambien to fall asleep and to wake up the next day to continue performing.

    Xanny?

    And also, I also wonder why a lot of these rappers, were supposed to be super tough or whatever, why are they all talking about Xanax? Because I think they are all riddled with anxiety, that is why they comatose themselves with alcohol marijuana and sex, perhaps porn pornography as well in order to just fall asleep at night?

    The truth is bad

    So I’ve discovered a lot of truths, but ultimately I’ve discovered that the truth is pretty ugly and bad. And that actually the point of philosophy isn’t truth-finding, rather, it is more of an artistic pursuit, towards beauty, joy, aesthetics, ethos and ethics.

    The reason why almost everything is bad is that everything created or produced or whatever is typically created by unhealthy individual individuals, unhealthy corporations, all on some sort of fiat based standard.

    Therefore as a consequence, I would say only put your trust in individuals, institutions or whatever, which are financially independent, on a 100% undiluted diversified bitcoin standard.

    For example, am I the only YouTuber or podcast I know that has zero advertisements of any kind?

    And this is where also I am a bit suspicious of a Joe Rogan; why does he still do these advertisements which are insanely lame? Isn’t he already super super rich?

    Also, maybe this is where the idea of a Joe Rogan coin or a Joe Rogan token is a great idea; I invest $100 in Joe Rogan coin, in order to have the privilege of not having to listen to annoying advertisements, and he could do an ethical way. And he could do some sort of Joe Rogan club in which anybody who owns at least $1000 worth of Joe Rogan coin could join him on a private zoom call, ask him any questions etc.

    Maybe I’ll introduce an ERIC KIM coin one day. 

    Autotelic goals?

    So a big idea that I have is once you’re dumb rich, everything you could be doing is autotelic in nature; which means you only do stuff that you really care for, things that you think will benefit the human race. Because you no longer need to make a profit off of it.

    For example, one of the big problems is that everyone is always trying to chase a profit, which leads people to just getting burnt out?

    If you’re already independently wealthy, then you could just do anything that you want!

    An interesting thought; there’s a guy named Derek Sivers, sivers.org I think ,,, and he became independently wealthy I think maybe from selling some sort of tech company? Anyways apparently now his community service is just answering emails from random people all across the globe with random questions?

    Also, I’m not sure what Tim Ferris is up to, however, last time I checked, I think he’s still doing podcasts, and once again I’m not really sure why he still needs to put annoying advertisements on his podcasts, isn’t he super rich? I almost find that it is more intelligent and better for him to just promote his own products his own stuff, rather than promoting the products of other people and their services?

    Promoting other people is unethical, promoting yourself is more ethical?

    Once again, I think Joe Rogan is great! The reason why Joe Rogan became the uber GOAT is because he never censored himself, he is no BS, and he’s just likable as a person!

    I think there would be a ton of people willing to pay 10 bucks a month to be part of a Joe Rogan fan club or something, or even for him to have a special newsletter to only $10 a month Joe Rogan fan club members.

    Because honestly at this point, money is essentially free; everyone has a ton of money and if somebody is undiluted, 100% honest and pure, you want to support them!

    How to uncensor yourself

    So, I think the world of social media whatever people are loss averse; they are afraid of losing followers likes comments, subscribers etc. For example, even for myself, my email newsletter I’m slowly bleeding my email newsletter list from around 13,000 down to around maybe 8500 or so?

    And also I think my YouTube, went from maybe 75,000 subscribers to now around 55,000?

    And also my intelligent strategy of deleting my Instagram at its peak, at around 65,000 followers and rapidly growing in around 2017, and I haven’t looked back since? And note the ERICKIMphoto on Instagram is not me; it was recreated by some sort of virtuous and noble fan!

    But anyways, I found that by trying to placate to the masses in some sort of non-controversial matter is not a winning strategy; to have 300 diehard fans is 1000000x better than having 1 million mildly interested followers?

    Think King Leonidas and his brave 300!

    All you need is 300 cyber Spartans!

    The internet is toxic

    If you have ever smelled sewer sewage water, like the smell of shit 1000 times over, you know how terrible the smell is. This is the last thing you want to smell before drinking a fine wine or eating your favorite rib eye steak,,,

    And also, what if I told you that actually the truth was, 100% of the toxic comments on the internet were actually in fact created by bots?

    For the most part going online is like voluntarily jumping into a sewer full of all the dung and foul stuff! With no hazmat suit!

    Nobody is on Reddit

    I’ll give you another example, I was using Reddit since like my freshman year of college, in 2006, but I quit around 2011. I would literally check it like 200 times a day, to kill the monotony of working my IT tech student job.

    Anyways, I think the whole time I never created an account, and I think in the whole like four years of using a religiously, I only ever posted one comment just to be funny?

    Therefore my theories; I wonder if all these comments on Reddit, I wonder if they’re all just bots? This were the case would you change your approach? Of course!

    Envy?

    Envy is an attribute of weak souls.

    What is more constructive? Insane and extreme self pride!

    This is actually the funny unorthodox thought; the thought is actually, being insanely self interested, self prideful and gloatful is actually a virtue?

    I’ll give you an example — schadenfreude, or feeling some sort of superiority complex, by pitying or having compassion for worser off people?

    Ignore other people and their kids

    For example, something I’m starting to become exposed to is other people other kids, etc.

    Now Seneca has never been in some sort of foreign daycare or childcare or standardized schooling yet, and he’s about to turn four. As a consequence, because I’m his personal trainer and teacher, he’s like pretty much on 100% carnivore diet, Wagyu beef, 100% grass-fed burger patties, etc. And actually, the other day when I took him to Legoland for like eight hours, he had a new meat PR, a new personal record; .7 pounds of ground beef burger patty, in a single day? That’s like 3/4ths of a pound, or nearly a pound of beef!

    Anyways as a consequence Seneca is way taller stronger buffer, more intelligent and wise, better social skills, and also because he has a goddess for a mother, aka Cindy, she is insanely handsome fun and happy! He’s like the happiest, most giggly kid of all time. He’s essentially always laughing.

    Anyways, whenever I see kids who are punier than him, my best strategy is to try to just not compare because I obviously know that Seneca is far superior.

    And this is we’re having a pity party for other people their problems their kids is not constructive; I say all in or nothing.

    For example, if you want to stage some sort of intervention, you essentially must be 100% committed. And my personal thought is this could only ever happen if it is your own child! Otherwise, you will not be 100% committed.


    100% time commitment

    First, the time commitment idea.

    The only way I am able to raise and shape and train Seneca the way he is is because I’m like with him 100% of the day. And this is the extreme privilege of being self-employed; even if you had the world’s best Montessori, there will never ever ever ever ever be a better teacher or personal trainer than you!

    And also this might sound a bit sexist but I also find the bizarre thing is that if you are a man, and you have a son like your firstborn son… why are there so few male teachers and role models? And also,,, shouldn’t a man, a father raise his own son, his own firstborn son?

    Think Leonidas

    For example if this was ancient Sparta, and you want to train your son to become a warrior king, certainly you would want some sort of insanely jacked and virtuous man to train your kid.

    Also as a heuristic; never trust a personal trainer who is not buffer or stronger than you. 

    And this is why I have never ever ever had a personal trainer in my life because no one has ever been as strong unorthodox or courageous as myself; until I have met somebody who could lift 1000 pounds, the thousand pound ERIC KIM Atlas lift, I’m ain’t interested.

    Now what?

    So, the best thought is we are all on the same team, the same squad! No competition here, because once again we’re on the same team!

    Thich Nhat Hanh had a piece of wisdom in one of his writing pieces is that does the left hand envy at the right hand for being stronger, more nimble or superior? No! The left hand doesn’t have an inferiority complex. And also, if you are a lotus flower, and you are surrounded by daffodils, do you envy the daffodil? No!

    Or if you’re a panda, do you envy the cougars? No!

    The same myology is true with trees; certainly every tree desires to be the tallest the most dominant, etc. However, I don’t think necessarily any trees envy other trees. They just stay focused on themselves, digging their roots ever deeper into the floor, to grow ever higher?

    Being “autistic”– autos, self centered as a virtue.

    Never stop growing!

    So my personal thought is with life everything in-between; the goal isn’t to compare yourself with others, but rather to stay focused on yourself, and keep stacking yourself and growing yourself! And your kid, your family etc.

    So for example, a simple personal goal that I have for myself is I want to always become physiologically stronger, more muscular, more dominant, more full of energy and vigor, more happiness joy, etc. Yet I do not compare myself with others; because once again, nobody else is as blessed or fortunate as myself.

    The benefit of not going to the gym no more

    Even a big benefit of not going to the gym anymore is that whenever I engage in some sort of weightlifting activity, it truly tests my own self-sincerity; am I doing this for myself, or to flex on others?

    I think it’s fine to try to flex on others, but often the big problem is when you try too hard to flex on others, you could actually end up injuring yourself in a bad way?

    A 2-year mistake

    For example one of the bad regrets I had about two years ago, I’m OK now, is that I saw a bunch of guys who are bench pressing a lot, and I wanted to flex on them by benching even more, and in the process, I had a pretty bad injury in my right wrist, which took me nearly 2 years to fully recover!

    Once again, one foolish display of machismo caused me two years of anguish. 

    And this is where patience is a virtue; and also, the virtue of being self focused, self-centered.

    Being self-centered is our new virtue. 

    ERIC


    Never stop learning

    1. Stoicism
    2. Ethics
    3. Philosophy

    And always when in doubt,

    START HERE


    What I’m reading

    1. Principles of economicsSaifedean
    2. The Odyssey, Emily Wilson Translation Also, Free open source books by KIM >

  • Introduction to Bitcoin Transcript

    Super pumped to share with you, my first full length lecture on an introduction to bitcoin, the bitcoin Revolution, and also this edited transcript that I provided for you!

    1. Full video zoom recording Dropbox link
    2. PDF SLIDES
    3. AUDIO FULL
    4. PDF version of new transcript for talk

    The Bitcoin Revolution (WILL) Be Televised!

    So the Bitcoin revolution, the revolution will be televised. So, starting off.

    First, what is Bitcoin? Why does it matter?

    So I think the 1st important critical thing is trying to consider and think you know what is Bitcoin we’ve all heard about in the news we heard about Bitcoin as being a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. And honestly, my mom has gone through her fair share of Ponzi schemes like she she got suckered by the whole Amway scam.

    I think the reason why Bitcoin is so important and critical is, Bitcoin is like the early days of the Internet. So if you go into a time machine and you could tell somebody in the past, okay, you know, in the days before email existed. Right? So okay, once one day, you know, everyone’s gonna have a supercomputer in their pocket. They’re using it to check all their bank statements. You’re going to be able to use your camera on your phone to scan your you know your checks, your bank account balances. You can use this to send money and messages and videos to everyone on the planet. Instantly everyone would have thought you were crazy.
    and I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin.

    So a constructive way of thinking about bitcoin is trying to figure out what bitcoin is not.

    My personal opinion is, I do not think that Bitcoin is actually cryptocurrency. I think currency is the Us. Dollar, and I think one of the biggest problems about the whole field of crypto and cryptocurrency is everyone is like a crypto anarchist, which means that they want to see the Us. Government and all the governments on the planet fail, and they can essentially live in peace and silent without interference from the Government.

    Yet, you know, obviously, at the end of the day, it’s nice to have public streets. It’s nice to not get robbed in the streets. And actually, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin is. People think that Bitcoin is trying to replace the Us. Dollar.

    But my personal thought is, Bitcoin is going to be a supplement to the Us. Dollar.

    Essentially, I thought this a long time ago that essentially Bitcoin is digital gold to hedge against inflation, which means, as our money, our Us. Dollars, or our euros, or our local currencies become devalued.

    The upside is, our Bitcoin will become more valuable. I think the best analogy that I got was from chairman of microstrategy mstr Michael saylor, essentially thinking that Bitcoin is is not digital currency, but digital
    real estate.

    So I think this analogy is better, because nobody’s on their zillow, you know, 20 times a day, checking their home prices right? And this is my mad Max Post Apocalyptic perspective. So imagine the future where there’s, you know, essentially
    there’s this like nuclear fallout. And you know.
    there’s no inhabitable places anywhere. And let us say, there’s only 21 million single family homes left on the planet for anybody to live. Obviously, sooner or later, you know, people are going to want somewhere to live. And so I think the best analogy, I think, is Bitcoin as digital real estate, which means that with digital real estate.

    Monetizing Bitcoin?

    You know, a lot of people are like– I want to quickly make money off of Bitcoin. But how do I make money off of it? It’s kind of like the early days of real estate. So if you bought Manhattan in the 1600s, you know, how do you monetize it? And I still think that we’re in the very, very early days of bitcoin and institutional adoption, which means you’re going to start to see New Bitcoin products come out. So some simple thoughts. So we’ve all heard stories of Scumbag San Francisco based scumbag landlords, you know, charging an arm and a leg for their tenants, and we all hate the landlords, I think with Bitcoin we’ll become the new digital landlords, which means effectively, we will in the future be able to like rent out our Bitcoin. And you know, let’s say we have one bitcoin right, and it’s and then I think that the personal math I like to do in my head is thinking that one Bitcoin is equivalent to one single family home. So I currently live in Los Angeles, in Culver City. It’s kind of insane. A single family home. I’ve even seen some in my neighborhood for 4.4 million dollars. The average Median household single family home is around 1.7 million dollars.

    So in my personal mind, where I think Bitcoin is a trillion times more valuable than physical real estate land, because you could always make more of it. It’s not a real scarcity.

    A single family home, and the price of a Bitcoin should be pegged to another.

    So in my mind I still think of a Bitcoin at least 1.1
    1.7 2.1, maybe even 4.4 million dollars a coin. And I think this is a very very fascinating idea, because also, you know, people say, Oh, but Bitcoin is not real. Money is yeah, but like our dead, shiny rocks. Aka. Gold money either, or is fiat currency, you know pieces of paper. You cannot eat pieces of paper to to live. And I think one of the most interesting things I learned about the philosophy of money is that essentially all money is just existing in the minds and souls of men, the value for men, is all essentially subjective.

    Money is not “real”, but subjective.

    Now, what makes Bitcoin so fascinating to me is that it’s the 1st time in human existence, you had a hard cap supply of money.

    So, for example, people often talk about gold, right? So the issue with gold is at the time it was the least bad form of money, because it was very, very scarce. It was difficult to find. It’s difficult to mine and transport. Yet there was lots of good properties of gold. It’s, you know, essentially it kind of lasts forever. Aesthetically, it looks beautiful, the nice yellow color of gold mimics that of the sun, and you know, at least back in the day, let’s say you had gold coins it could easily fit in your front pocket whatevers.

    But now things become a lot more difficult because we’re living in the 21st century, the 22nd century you know, we would have flying car drone robo taxi, self driving car waymos. It’s like, Why are we still using an antiquated digital framework of modern day banking swift code accounts?

    I hate the banks

    If you’ve ever tried to send money, you know, from the Netherlands to South Korea, to Nigeria, to Lagos whatever you find that the the whole SWIFT system is kind of like a bunch of gangster mafiosas like even my mom is currently living in South Korea.

    Example if I want to just send my mom a small sum of money, it is insane,  it takes like three or four days, and the wire transfer fees like 55 bucks, I hate this. This should be done instantly. Therefore the thought of bitcoin, being able to quickly and effectively and securely transfer value across time and space without a trusted intermediary is a big big deal, a big big revolution.

    Peer to Peer Capital

    So why does Bitcoin matter? It’s kind of like asking somebody why does clean water matter so one of the things I love about Michael Saylor, and I highly recommend watching all of his videos. @wsaylor. It’s essentially Twitter or X or michael.com.

    He uses this analogy of sewer water. So let us say, every all 8 billion people on the planet are all drinking sewer water, and people are dying of dysentery, and people are saying, I don’t get it, you know I exercise, you know. I
    you know I eat healthy exercise every day, but I’m still dying of dysentery. My kids are dying of dysentery, and so the whole issue is that if you’re drinking sewer water, no matter how healthy your lifestyle is, how virtuous you is. It don’t matter. You’re going to be, you know, dying of dysentery, or perpetually sick.

    And so, if we think about these physiological terms, and apply it to Bitcoin and money and digital capital. This becomes really fascinating because my personal thought and you know, also, I grew up in a family of poverty, poverty, meaning that I thought I was going to be homeless at least 2 or 3 times. My dad was perpetually addicted to gambling with the rent money.

    So what a lot of people don’t understand about growing up in poverty, and prosody is that the logical strategy that you never know when your dad is going to steal your money and gamble it away, and therefore the smart strategy is actually to spend it all right now! Because you never know when he’s going to look in your piggy bank, your personal checking account that your mom put away for your college, or even take your hard earned $3000 as a 15-year-old bus boy at your mom sushi restaurant, lying that you’re going to invest in some business, leaving to LA for about a month, gambling it away, and coming back empty.

    When I think about it, this is actually super sad. Once again when I was like super super young like two years old, my mom tried to make me a savings account, like one of those checking or savings investing accounts for kids, and she might’ve had a nominal amount of money in it, like 200 or 250 bucks or something. And she told me the sad news is that one day when she checked up on it she discovered that the money was gone. Essentially my dad even stole away that $250 from my child savings account for college, once again feed his gambling addiction.

    The logic 

    So once again, as a kid growing up, I never had this ethos or tactic of saving. Because we literally cannot come every dime that my mom made was fun into paying for groceries and rent.

    Therefore I like a 15-year-old kid, my thought was I’m going to take every single penny, I can immediately go out buying some new sneakers, you know, buy some cool clothes, and I literally had $0 in my bank account.

    Don’t blame poor people

    So I think the pernicious, vicious cycle of inflation is.

    You cannot blame people for not saving up capital for their future if the money itself is deflating at such a rapid pace, and so I personally think that you know Bitcoin is like giving every single person on the planet like unlimited free Fiji water, or the best alkaline hipster water whatever water you want. Essentially giving people clean water. And
    a lot of people say, Yeah, but Bitcoin is not real money. It’s a okay. So I think this is a big this is a big shift for me also, personally.

    My personal thought is, Bitcoin is actually more important than money.

    Capital > Money

    So we should not think about money. We should think about capital. I think capital is a lot more robust and strong as a concept. So, for example, capital comes from Cap CAP. Like upon your head. K-ap. Essentially it came from the head of oxen. So if you read the Iliad, the Odyssey essentially, every time you want to appease the gods, you have to sacrifice a hectacomb, Hecta means 100 a hundred head of oxen to appease the gods.

    And you know, obviously, that’s very expensive, like, can you imagine, if you know you sacrificed a hundred Lamborghinis to appease the gods, it would be quite expensive endeavor. Right?

    And so, capital. We all live under Capitalism — it doesn’t matter if you’re living in Europe, Africa, Asia, America, China, and also one thing that people don’t understand is, I think, what a lot of these people, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, China is going to take over. China’s not going to take over. China is dependent on America, and effectively, the Chinese Yuan the CNY is essentially effectively pegged to the Us. Dollar and the Us. The US is essentially the world. Reserve currency and capital is what we seek, not money.

    Currency?

    Talking about currency, so currency is like, you know, buying a Starbucks Frappuccino, or buying a in and out Burger. Right? That’s like money currency, right?

    Capital is essentially long storm, long term, store of value. So it’s building generational wealth.

    So one of my favorite songs from Kanye West is the off the grid songs that we off the grid grid grid this for my kid, kids, for when my kids, kids have kids.

    And I think this is also the big thing is a lot of millennials, nowadays, I think the disincentive to have kids is because there’s so much fear mongering about the the future is gonna become uninhabitable, you know boil the seas or whatever. So there’s not going to be a future. So essentially, there’s a strong sense of pessimism.

    But Bitcoin, to me is like solidified optimism, which means that the future is going to be glorious and great. And you know, even having Seneca right now, think about his future kids, kids, kids, or my future kids, kids, kids.
    It brings me so much joy. Because the simple strategy, you just keep stacking Bitcoin until you die, and then you hand it on to your kids. Your kids give it to their kids kids. It’s like, if you owned, you know, a hundred penthouses or 10 square blocks or 20 square blocks in Manhattan, on the main island. Do you ever sell that to buy a Lamborghini? No! That’s not what one does, or liquefy it all into us dollars and brag about how many billions of dollars you have in your bank account.

    Nope, that’s not the goal– you want to build capital. And traditionally it’s been real estate. But once again, real estate was a good idea. In the 16 hundreds, 17 hundreds, 18 hundreds, 19 hundreds, or 2000s. But then the subprime mortgage meltdown proved that, you know maybe it’s not always the best idea.

    Real estate can go down.

    Only one reason

    And I think the hard thing is, people say, Yeah, but you know, real estate, you know, essentially, everyone needs somewhere to live, and it’s historically, the value of real estate is always going to go up forever. Now people say that the tricky thing is the pace of monetary inflation is around 15%. The best thing is to either chat Gpt or Google The M2 Money Supply. And essentially what you will find is
    that the money supply is essentially a metric in which the Us. Government, or any other government on the planet, includes the euro and stuff. They keep printing more currency. And the reason why then this becomes an issue is that if you have more currency in the system that means the individual value of each unit is going to go down.

    The shake shack effect

    I call this the shake Shack Burger incident. So me and Seneca we used to always buy a single burger, patty, for $1.49, $1.50 … and one day we come and they say no it is $2.50, a party.

    Why this makes no sense is like, yeah, we just increased the minimum wage to $20 an hour from $15 an hour. $20 an hour for fast food, and the hard thing is with minimum wage. You cannot rewind the the hands of time. If you suddenly said that the minimum wage is only $17 an hour, there will be riots. The streets would not be not be good.

    Bitcoin is digital photography

    So we’re all photographers, you know, street photographers, whatever. And the hard thing with digital is in our minds, digital is infinite and free. So, for example, I could take a copy of Mozart’s 5th Symphony, or whatever, as an mp3, file, and I could copy and distribute it a trillion times with 0 marginal cost right?

    So this is where the notion of cyber becomes more interesting. And I’ll think about like, you know, cyber punk thinking about cyber truck.

    It’s essentially once again, mathematically, cryptographically, that the hard science and the hard math is there can never be more than 21 million coins
    in existence come up forever. Even if you took all the quantum ultra computers on the planet, times it by 20, you still could not produce more bitcoins. It’s just how it works right?

    The immortal gold cyber oxen

    One Bitcoin is like one cyber-ox, and it’s immortable, immortal, indestructible. It’ll give you life forever. And there’s only gonna be 21 million of them in the future. And now and so this is your chance to get one for an extreme discount.

    Buying a single-family home in Los Angeles for only $100,000 

    Let’s even say let’s say you want to buy a single family home. Let’s say it costs a million euros or whatever. Right? So if I could tell you today that you could buy a single family home for only $100,000 or €100,000 you’d be like, wow, that’s that’s the deal of a century. That’s you’re still getting a 90% discount.

    And my personal thought is Bitcoin is far more valuable than real estate, because in the next 20-30 years, when essentially all the all the baby boomers, The Gen. Xers die off, and it’s the millennials and Gen. Z’s. And, alphas!

    What do we care for?

    When we millennials take over, what’s interesting is that we don’t really care about physical real estate anymore. We will care about digital cyber real estate which is bitcoin. 

    So my personal story, how did I get into Bitcoin? So it might seem a little bit random. It’s like, Okay, ERIC, you’re super famous for photography, street photography like, how do you get to Bitcoin like? It’s like, so random, right? But actually, it’s not very random at all, because, you know, if you’ve been following me carefully, you know the whole time, I’ve always been talking about living minimalistically, frugally, Spartan lifestyle, whatever’s. And you know now that you know I’m pretty stacked with a bitcoin and microstrategy stock mstr.

    Funny enough, I’ve personally found that my lifestyle habits haven’t changed much after getting super rich, I mean, I’m a little bit more generous, maybe, like, you know, took out a friend last night to all you eat Korean barbecue
    paid for her bill didn’t really even flinch.

    Even a random aside, my best friend and my best man Justin, told me this when we were like in our early 20s, when we finally got good paying jobs whatever, is that the greatest joy is being able to eat out and not really feel the pain associated with having to eat out because we both grew up poor. 

    I still remember even when I was undergraduate at UCLA, after our KYRIE club meeting, we would all go out to eat, and then I would see all the other guys ordering these really expensive $15 Korean barbecue gogi plates, (this was in 2006, when you could still buy a foot-long sub sandwich for five bucks), and $1.99 tacos, and $1 tacos, and me trying to save money, would force myself not to eat even though I was hungry, and my friends would ask me if I was hungry and I would lie, and say I wasn’t, while my stomach was still grumbling. 

    Monetary, financial freedom is the goal

    So my personal thought with Bitcoin is, I personally wanted monetary freedom, and so long story short, so I’ll never forget this moment. So I’m born 1988. Went to UCLA as an undergrad — my roommate at the time, Kevin. It’s our junior he’s on Reddit, and I’ll never forget we’re in our studio apartment. I think I was distracted. I was doing something else. He was like Eric, you know. He’s on some subreddit, and he’s like.

    “Oh, Eric, this thing called Bitcoin, and there’s this one dude who just bought two domino’s pizzas for like 10,000 bitcoins. We should just get like a hundred bucks worth of bitcoin, and just see what happens.”

    I then responded “Eh, seems like a scam” and disregarded it. No this is one bitcoin was like less than a penny, so even if me and Kevin and my roommate Kevin, just bought a hundred bitcoins at the time for funsies, right? And I had a hundred bucks right? We would each be worth at least 1.2 billion dollars.

    If I had bought $100 worth of bitcoin at the time, once again we would each have about $1.2 billion in our checking accounts.

    Everything happens as it should have happened 

    Today, I’m like, man. This was like the worst mistake of my life, right? But everything has happened as it should have happened. You know. Maybe if I had become a billionaire I’d just become some degenerate, you know. Cocaine addict on some beach somewhere in in Hawaii, and then Seneca would never been born. I would have never done my photography, world travels, whatevers.

    Then my reintroduction to Bitcoin was kind of more recently when moving to LA. The cost of living is so expensive, and you know every I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want financial freedom. A long story short, I 1st heard about Bitcoin again, kind of earlier than when I was living in Vietnam around 2017, 2018, and at the time I didn’t really need Bitcoin, because our living expenses were so cheap. It was $320 bucks a month for a brand new studio apartment, fully furnished up, uplighting and the jazz right? And even at the time, passively, the income we’re making. Let’s say it’s a $1000- $2,000 a month. Let’s say it’s not even that much right, but like our whole total expenses, living expenses like maybe $600-700 a month, so I had the epiphany I’m like, I’m never going to run out of money. So already, at the age of 26 in my mind, I mentally retired right
    and just more for funsies.

    Buying bitcoin for $6,999 a Bitcoin

    I met this guy named Bing in Singapore. Heard about this thing called Digibyte. Dgb, I don’t even think they’re around anymore. But at the time I’m like, Okay, I want to buy some bitcoins, buy some digibyte. How do I do this? And at the time Coinbase seemed like the best option, because it was the simplest, most minimalist to me it looked like the paypal for for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

    For fun I bought about $25,000 worth of bitcoin, which, and Bitcoin was only about $7,000, $6,999 a bitcoin. So that was around 3.5 bitcoins. 

    I then traded some bitcoin for digibyte, and I kept some bitcoin in my Coinbase account. Then the next few years I essentially saw the waves and the crashes and the dogecoins and stuff like that.

    And essentially, I just kind of woke up to my guts and found out that Bitcoin was a real deal.

    Satoshi is the Bitcoin Jesus

    Some strange analogies is to me Bitcoin is almost like a new
    World economic religion, I mean, people who follow Bitcoin are like fanatic. They’re zealous about it. They follow Michael Saylor like he’s like you know the prophet. You know the next prophet of Bitcoin right?

    And it’s always good to invest in religions or to invest in cults like the cult of Tesla, Elon Musk apple, Steve Jobs. Whatevs, right?

    Why?

    Now obviously, I have financial independence now, and the only reason I’m teaching this workshop or sharing this information is, I almost feel like it’s my ethical imperative. Once again, if you could have discovered internet in the early days, or clean drinking water, I would feel that it would almost be a disservice if I did not share this information with others.

    Future value

    So everyone’s always about like, okay, so what is the Bitcoin gonna be worth? So there’s the open source model. Michael Saylor, I think, helped create it. It’s called the Bitcoin 21 model, I think. Right?

    So 21 years from now his base case is that Bitcoin is going to be $13 million a Bitcoin. Bear case, $3 million a Bitcoin. The bull case is $49 million a Bitcoin, and note, this was in 2024 in July before Trump was announced as President, and he is ultra super pro crypto and bitcoin and also worth following, is his son Eric Trump, ironically. His name is also Eric also the funny thing. There’s a bunch of Eric’s actually in the world of Bitcoin, Eric Kim Eric Semler, of semler scientific, this other Etf guy who works for Bloomberg. His name is Eric Balconus, or something like that.

    Follow Eric Trump

    Essentially, we have an all Republican trump, pro bitcoin pro crypto, President and cabinet, whatever right?

    More bullish

    What is really fascinating about Michael Saylor’s predictions for the future price of bitcoin is that when it was only $65,000 a bitcoin, and we were a bit uncertain about what the future of bitcoin and the president and the government would look like.

    The last four years, we were all fighting an uphill battle, because the former administration was adamantly anti-crypto and anti-bitcoin. Gary Gensler who seems like a smart guy, was for some reason really anti-bitcoin and crypto? 

    The next four years will be glorious!

    And so these were all written by Michael Saylor’s predictions before we had the most pro bitcoin
    government of all time. So all these numbers, I think, should be inflated. So my personal thought is, I think, for the next 4 years once Trump takes office, January 20, 2025. I think this will be the craziest, best Bitcoin Bull Run of all time the next 4 years. So currently, Bitcoin’s been going up around 60% to 62% arr annual rate of return. And I think once Trump takes office, and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna buy the 1 million Bitcoins, or whatever for the strategic American Reserve.

    And also I think Eric Trump, his son, is committed to having Bitcoin be at least a million in Bitcoin.

    120% Bitcoin ARR for the next 4 years

    So let’s see. So my personal prediction, right? So I think Bitcoin will grow by at least 120% arr over the next 4 years. So let’s say, Bitcoin is worth around $100,000 right now. So by next year, let’s say it’s $250,000 the year after that, let’s say it’s $750,000, let’s say the year after that it’s like $1.2 million. So I think we’re on track to hit a million a bitcoin in 4 years about 10x gain. So just do the math from then.

    The $1 million dollar cybertruck

    Currently as an account measure, I now equate one bitcoin being worth one cyber truck, assuming that a cyber truck is currently around $100,000.

    So the smart strategy is to take your hundred thousand dollars and invest it into bitcoin today, and you’ll see that becoming $1 million in four years. 

    What that means is sell your cyber truck for $100,000, buy bitcoin, otherwise you have just done spent $1 million on your cyber loser truck.

    Cyber warfare 

    Now, people are always asking, okay, this, you know, Bitcoin reserve strategy, you know, like, how is? And why is America going to buy the Bitcoins? Right? So we’re essentially out of physical land and real estate. Now we have to go to cyberspace right?

    And it seems kind of silly, like something out of a sci-fi film. But the truth is, they’re currently the war we’re having with China and Russia. It’s it’s not physical war per se. It’s actually cyber war. So cyber security is the big big money maker. Even cyber penetration testing. Right? I think Gmail is trying to get like all these malicious actors trying to attack the Gmail servers like a million times a minute. Something crazy, right?

    And if you look at the history of America, right? So, Manhattan, 1600s, the price of Manhattan. It was essentially stolen from the natives. Right? 60 guilders, right Louisiana purchase, you know, to fund Napoleon, California. Also kind of stolen from the the local Mexicans right? And also Alaska right. The the payoff was great, right, and so essentially the Bitcoin Act, the Cynthia Lummis Bill, she’s trying to get the States to buy at least a million bitcoins right? And you know even a Michael Saylor is much more aggressive. He’s like no America should at least purchase maybe 5 or 6 million bitcoins, which is 20 to 25% of the whole Bitcoin supply. And all America has to do is a free trade. They just need to sell their gold and then buy Bitcoin.

    The super evil genius plan 

    And in a recent interview that I was listening from Saylor.
    super fascinating, is like essentially what he said was the super evil genius strategy of America selling her gold reserves and buying Bitcoin is that if that’s the case,
    we demonetize our enemies.

    You know, gold capital reserves.

    So then suddenly, the the gold of the Russians, the Chinese, will go to 0, and then everyone’s going to rush into Bitcoin. And if America owns Bitcoin, it’s a good sign for the future.

    Why America is the GOAT

    And also another big thing I want to talk about. Why does America have the best economy on the planet?
    So we essentially gave birth to Apple Amazon, Facebook, the magnificent 7 stocks, Netflix. And you know, people talk about China. It’s like. Okay, I don’t know a single rich mainland Chinese oligarch who doesn’t want to send their kids to the States to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, you know, buy a nice house in Palo Alto, the Bay area, or even Vancouver.

    No rich mainland Chinese person actually wants to be in China, but because of capital controls, they’re kind of stuck. So once there’s going to be a mad rush to Bitcoin. That means that you, your family, your whole squad, is going to prosper now.

    Simple storage is best.

    My friend Dante had a question about storage. So I think the hard thing with storage is okay. So how do you say this?
    This is my personal philosophy. The reason I do not personally trust cold storage for myself or more of these self custody options is that I know that I am very forgetful, and my biggest fear is, let’s say, I forget my passcode, or whatever is right to the Bitcoins. And or let’s say, my kids, kids can forget it right? Then boom like, you’re gonna be out like a hundred 1 million dollars. Right? So that’s that’s not fun, right? And so personally, I think the easiest is to just, you know, store it on the cloud. So, using a trusted custodian, whether it be coinbase. I think fidelity has their own services now.

    And the you know honestly, it seems like Coinbase is probably the best option,,, coinbase.com, or you just download your iphone ipad. Whatever right is that you could also get a link with your biometric apple id data, whether it be face id or thumbprint. Whatevs right? So this way, it just feels much more secure.

    So for me, I would prefer an 80 to 85% optimal thing that is kind of dummy proof rather than take the 100% secure option which, because of user error, I might fail, and something that I personally learned is in terms of technology. And all these things in between
    seeking the simplest, most straightforward option
    that is least complicated is often the best solution.

    Don’t trust advertisements 

    And the reason I would be very, very wary of a lot of these people promoting, you know, buying their hardware wallets. Whatever right, everyone has a buck to make. Everyone has a bitcoin to make. Everyone wants to make a few satoshis here and there.

    So they’re trying to fear monger us. Oh, you’re gonna you know, Coinbase going to get hacked. And I’m like, no, I don’t think it is. It’s like, you know, back. It’s like essentially a Us. Government backed institution, you know, it’s essentially it’s traded on the the the US Stock Exchange. It’s a American based company. I would not trust anything outside of the States.

    Who should use cold storage

    If you’re super, you know, quant genius, autistic genius, then do all the cold storage stuff. But if in doubt, just the simplest thing is, coinbase seems to be the best.

    The ERIC KIM Free Money Hack

    Okay, so this is kind of my free money hack. So I call this microstrategy, strategy, mstr microstrategy versus bitcoin. And okay, so it’s very, very simple. So this becomes a philosophical debate. To say it short.
    I think the ultimate goal is to own Bitcoin, he or she, or the entities which own the most Bitcoin shall win.

    And so for me, philosophically, you know, let us say that you could own, you know, 20 bitcoins, or you could own 2 million dollars worth of micro strategy. Mstr. Stock. Right?
    10-20, 30 years from now, right?

    With MSTR you’re going to actually outperform Bitcoin. You’re actually going to make more money from microstrategy stock than Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, historically, has been 60% to 62% ARR annual rate of return MicroStrategy is almost double that 120 to 125 ARR. So if you actually want to maximize your returns, you just buy microstrategy stock mstr.

    Risk factors

    The issues is, you know let us say that Michael Saylor gets shot. He gets killed. He dies in a Cybertruck self driving accident whatever. Right? Then, it’s probably not going to be the world’s best future for microstrategy. So it’s actually much more risky.

    If you want the least risky option, just put all your money into Bitcoin.

    We the new Spartan Bitcoin demigods!

    And some millennial living strategies. Right? So the the simplest strategy I have, I call it the Spartan strategy. This is why I personally follow. Is you essentially try to live as minimally and frugally and sparse as you can, and just put literally 90% of your income into bitcoin.

    And a free money hack I discovered. So, for example, let’s say you have $150,000 or €150,000. Right? And you know I’m not 100% sure how it works if you’re a European.

    Anyways what you do is you buy microstrategy stock. So let’s say you buy, you know, $100,000 or $150,000 worth of it right? And Mstr, and you use fidelity, or robinhood, or whatever trading app you have. Right.

    And the strategy is simple.

    Let us say the base case is $150,000. Let’s say your microstrategy stock value then goes up to $200,000. Right?
    You sell $50,000 worth of it, and then you just transfer that to your bank account, and then your bank account is linked with your coinbase account. Then you just buy the Bitcoin — rinse and repeat.

    So very, very impressive over the last 3 months, I started with initial seed capital of around $150,000 in microstrategy stock, off of that $150,000 right and I haven’t even touched my principal. I yielded $242,000
    off of that initial $150,000. Once again I didn’t touch any of my principal. So essentially I made a free $240,000 dollars … in just 3 months!

    Just put it all into MSTR

    And also for traditional Roth, Roth, Ira retirement accounts. I put everything into microstrategy stock, and it had already like 3x’d.

    For example, My roth, Ira, just kind of randomly was like was $78,000, and then the course of 3 months it’s like now, $230,000. It peaked at around $300,000. So it’s going to be a good future.

    Minimize your expenses

    So the the very simple strategy– cut and reduce your expenses to a bare minimum.

    So let us say you’re able to get down your living expenses to let’s say you know, $5,000 bucks a month or €5,000 a month. Right? the point isn’t to just make a bunch of money and just go out and buy the Lambo. The the goal is actually to continue to live frugally. If anything live more frugally.

    The paradox of richness

    So the funny paradox here is that when people say they want to become a millionaire, but they’re really mean to say is I want to spend $1 million. 

    But the funny thing is the second you go out and you spend $1 million, you then become worth zero dollars.

    So actually, the game then is to stack your capital indefinitely and to see your numbers go up forever.

    And then the hilarious thing assuming that you’re like some sort of greedy money rich person, you actually continue to live as frugally as possible, and not touch your capital. 

    Stop the heat, capital loss

    I think one of the wise ways to think about money is like heat loss. For example, if you’re super effing cold, do you want to seal up the window windows and the spots of your house which loses heat.

    The same thing is with money and capital. You want to stop the capital loss.

    Premium gas is for suckers!

    So for example, the number one thing is the whole vehicle thing!

    Never ever ever ever ever purchase any vehicle that requires premium gas. This is like the stupidest mistake of all time.

    You continue driving your old Toyota Prius, and just pour all of your money in Bitcoin, because really the truth is and this is my philosophical thought is, there’s almost nothing worth on the planet purchasing.
    Besides, Bitcoin is my philosophical thought.

    The only thing worth purchasing on the planet is bitcoin. 

    Think economic leverage


    Also some even more super smart economic leverage.

    Instead of paying an arm and a leg for rent in La or New York. Brooklyn, you just move to like Southeast Asia.

    So if you move to Southeast Asia, you can live like a king, for like $300-500 bucks a month. Right? You just put all your money to Bitcoin.

    How to never run out of money 

    So even if you had a modest savings, right, let’s say you had like $200,000, and you have microstrategy stock.
    Let’s say every month of the month is rent is due, and the expenses are due right? You just sell a small portion of that stock, and it’s going to go up.

    So my thought on the next 4 years, microstrategy, assuming it’s around 2x Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is going to go up 120% ARR. I think microstrategy is going to double that 240% ARR. So just do the math.

    At the end of every single month in which expenses are due, let us say it’s like $1000 bucks or something… You just sell $1000 worth of bitcoin or microstrategy stock to just afford your lifestyle. 

    MSTR x Bitcoin

    But ultimately my personal thought is whatever excess, money and capital you have just put it onto Bitcoin.

    So the microstrategy then ends up becoming the engine or the turbocharger or the cash cow. You milk it, and you shave the cream off the top, and then you buy Bitcoin with it.

    So I think the reason why to me Bitcoin is such a fascinating thing, and very exciting, is essentially Bitcoin is digital photography.

    Peter Diamandis, the X prize guy. Right? You know, he talks a lot about kodak film. You know the iphone and disruption.
    So actually, intuitively, as photographers and digital photographers, we should actually understand bitcoin. You know, this disruptive power about digital photography. So obviously, you have the hipsters with their mustaches and their flannels, you know, talking about the virtues of film photography.

    But the truth is, digital photography is like a quadrillion times better than film photography.

    And also currently, in the year 2025, incoming
    digital photography is actually superior to film photography.

    In the early days of digital ,,, digital photography sucked. But now, at this point, digital photography is far superior to any sort of film photography, and the only reason you should shoot film in today’s world is either as like a practice to appreciate the joys of photography. So the philosophical approach. Or you know, you’re trying to be some sort of like, you know, snobby fine art photographer and overcharge money for your photos. Then you shoot film.
    Because honestly, the the fine art market, they’re always going to overvalue film photos over digital photos, because it’s more complicated. It’s more strange, right? So in the art, in the art world, the more complicated, abstruse, and complicated, you can make your art the better. But for us,
    where we care about practical things, yeah, think about Bitcoin. So think about the iphone iphone pro versus your mom’s kodak Browning camera. I think the the thought is obvious. Okay.

    How to start buying Bitcoin

    Very simple. Just download the coinbase app. Buy Bitcoin.

    MSTR stock

    If you don’t want to actually own Bitcoin, you just want to make a ton of money, just buy microstrategy stock MSTR, and use your traditional accounts.

    A new philosophy of wealth?

    So the tricky thing is everyone wants to be a millionaire, but instead of gaining 1 million bucks, and keeping and retaining the million bucks and growing it to 2 million, 5 million 10 million 100 million 1,000,000,000,000 etc., What most people want to do is to spend the million dollars.

    In fact, a thought was whenever you watch all these movies about the glamorous life of the Wolf of Wall Street whatever, in order to fit a 90 minute segment, there needs to be some sort of ostentatious displays of wealth, huge parties, babes, yachts, Drugs, debauchery, sex, and Lamborghini countach’s. 

    Stacking those bricks!

    Never stop stacking

    So, saving and building $1 million of capital, just think like money and Lego bricks, capital digital capital. 

    The other day I just went to legal end with Seneca, and it was great. An interesting thing that we were doing with some of the kids in the tot lot was taking these oversized Lego bricks, and just seeing how tall of a tower you could build.

    And then even the kids said the goal was to keep stacking the bricks.

    So the analogy is in LEGOS is that you want to keep building your Lego tower thing as tall as possible, you never want to get rid of your bricks and throw it into the trash. Also you do not want to mess up the stability of your Lego tower, as you build it ever higher, you must also conversely build it a bit wider to support the ever-growing height.

    Capitalism vs consumerism

    So assuming that money, every capital measure is just like a unit of money, a unit as being a single Lego brick. And I think that is essentially what consumerism is; instead of stacking your capital instead of stacking your Lego bricks, you essentially incinerate it into the trash. 

    This is actually another big philosophical thing I discovered is, what’s the difference between capitalism and consumerism.

    Consumerism is actually the exact opposite of capitalism.

    Capitalism is about accumulating wealth. Building your capital and not spending it. Even one of my favorite Kanye quotes is:

    “White people make money don’t spend it, but I’d rather buy 80 gold chains and go ignant (ignorant)”

    So the pernicious thing that happens in a lot of communities, especially poor communities, is everyone takes their hard earned cash, they wasted at Vegas the strip club, on loser Louis Vuitton clothes shoes sneakers Nike sneakers, Jordans etc. 

    I’ve also seen this happen with my own eyes. It happens all the time to Korean people. It happens to everybody, right?

    The truck is you’re a single guy, living in a crappy apartment in K-Town with 20 other dudes, yet you drive the brand new BMW. And you’re not building any sort of generational wealth. Right?

    So essentially the smart strategy is to build a capital and do not spend it. And essentially, you want to start to intelligently leverage your capital to give to your future kids or your descendants, or whatever you want to do.

    Building the balls for bitcoin 

    The hardest thing about Bitcoin is stomaching the volatility. Bitcoin and all the crypto assets in general tend to be much more volatile than the standard stocks in the NASDAQ 100 index, maybe besides microstrategy stock. 

    Now this is an important thing; a very interesting thing I saw at the San Diego children’s science center, there was a section on electricity, and there was this transformer that yielded both high voltage energy, as well as low-voltage energy which you could turn into a lightbulb.

    It was interesting you just pushed a button, and you had the two lightning rods, and you would see the high voltage energy surging through it, and it looks super dangerous and powerful. And I am very certain that in the early days of Nicola Tesla, Edison, there were probably a lot of people who accidentally touched electrical wire and died.

    Now even though there is a handful of people who died from miss handling electricity, it doesn’t mean that we suddenly ban electricity or fear it. Even today, the people who climbed the high ladders, fixed electricity poles, it is still a very dangerous job. But clean silent electricity might be the best innovation or technology for humans of all time.

    Bitcoin is electricity. Maybe if handled incorrectly, the high volatility the high energy the high power can kill a man. But if harnessed correctly, it could be the biggest benefit to humanity of all time.

    The stoic way

    So for most people who get into bitcoin for the first time, and maybe for people who have never day traded, or traded stocks or done risky stuff, stomaching the volatility the highs and lows the ups and downs is quite frightening.

     I consider myself fortunate because I’ve been exposed to trading stocks ever since I was 15 years old, and I’m 36 now. So I guess I’ve been in the game for at least 21 years.

    And also, studying stoicism, Zen, Taoism, Spartan philosophy, and hardcore one rep Max powerlifting has been good to steel my nerves, and my soul. 

    Practical thoughts

    The first thought is never check the price of bitcoin unless you actually plan on purchasing more. And actually, if you think about it… The price of bitcoin should never really even matter if you actually have money and plan on buying some.

    An interesting thought I got from Michael Saylor is that I will keep buying the top, forever.  I will continue purchasing bitcoin at $100,000, $250,000, $1 million, $10 million, and 55 million coin.  And who knows, maybe if I live long enough I could buy bitcoin at $1.1 billion of bitcoin. 

    If anything, this is actually a happy thought, if I’m privileged enough to live to be 120 or whatever, maybe I could actually live to see bitcoin hit over 1 billion a bitcoin, which means that this will be the best party of all time! Or, maybe Seneca could see it in his lifetime. 

    The false coins

    So a lot of people ask about ethereum dogecoin shibainu etc. I think Bitcoin is the only true one.

    Everything else is the false prophets. Everything else is the false coins. The immaculate conception of Bitcoin and Satoshi.

    False prophets

    So the difficult thing is everything that is not bitcoin, require some sort of intelligence Books person or PR team. The reason why I also got off of chain-link is that I started to realize that Sergey Nazarov was just a puppet, and Vitalik Buterin is no better — perhaps even weirder.

    So the hard thing about any sort of crypto asset which is not bitcoin, is if you have a real person associated to the thing… There are too many risk factors.

    For example, Jared Tate, the guy who invented Digibyte (DGB), somewhere along the line went off the rails, started to talk about all these weird conspiracy theories whatever. He may be right he might be wrong he might be partially right, but the biggest issue was once this happened, the digibyte community started to try to distance themselves from him. And obviously the price of DGB crashed — and I’m not even sure that anyone supports it anymore. I haven’t checked.

    The immaculate conception of bitcoin

    So you know in the Bible when they talk about mother Mary, the immaculate conception of Jesus, and the assumption, we could actually apply a metaphor to bitcoin. I actually do think it’s very critical that she gave his gift to the world, and then disappeared forever. Even actually if you did come out today, And prove that he was Satoshi, it wouldn’t actually really matter, actually in fact, we are all Satoshi. 

    Is bitcoin a cult?

    Of course it is! But then again, almost everything is a cult. Cult is just short for culture. When we think about weird scientologists and Tom Cruise and whatever, the only reason why the term cult got such a bad reputation is that they demand huge financial investments, and also they apparently do strange tactics to keep you inside the cult?  Even the thing that was kind of shocking to me when I heard it was that actually if you want to be part of a synagogue, you have to pay a monthly fee?

    Anyways, my thought is actually, it is a good idea to invest in cults. Investing in the cult of Apple, Steve Jobs, Tesla Elon Musk, SpaceX, etc.

    Hard caps matter.

    If there is only one thing that makes bitcoin valuable is that it has a hard cap of 21 million bitcoins forever.

    This is a big deal because Ethereum does not have a hard cap, you could actually always print more. 

    Volatility is vitality

    Volatility is vitality. Michael Saylor.

    Essentially volatility is vitality, and the more volatile the more energy the power you have, the more vitality you have.

    So once again, people think of volatility as being risk. That is actually not the case. Bitcoin is going to go up forever, but it’s going to be like an extreme roller coaster and go up down, but with extreme swings it’s extreme performance.

    Volatility is not risk.

    Volatility is just going up and down a lot, but essentially over a long enough time span, it’s going to go up forever.

    Think the market cap, the potential full market capitalization 

    Currently, Bitcoin is like a 2 trillion dollar asset class right? And this is also from Jesse Myers onceinaspecies.com.

    And the reason why this is important is currently the whole world’s economy is 900 trillion dollars, right? And
    what we have our eyes on is real estate. So real estate is, you know, most people don’t really just use real estate as a place to live right? Otherwise, you just rent. People use it for a long term store of value.

    So, for example, if you’re a really really rich family from New York City, you own, like 10 square blocks in Manhattan, and, you know, does your descendants sell, a square block to buy himself a few Ferraris. No, that that would be a bad strategy. So the the tip I have for any single person trying to build intergenerational wealth. Keep it simple. Only one rule. You don’t sell the Bitcoin. If you face extreme poverty or financial distress, I don’t know, become an Uber driver or something. Pay the bills, but don’t sell the Bitcoin.

    Bitcoin > Gold

    Currently I think we’re going to see is Bitcoin is just going to take over the gold market, which is 16 trillion dollars, maybe the cars and collectible art market.

    Utility or long-term store of value?

    Now, a big thought is this is from Michael Saylor is that all these assets on the planet– some of half of it is to provide utility. Right? So, for example, you need you need somewhere to live right? That provides utility.

    But then, again, some of it is to preserve capital right?

    Homes?

    So this is the tricky kind of low-key scam I think exist, we try to get suckered into buying a single-family home, or even worth a condo, because simply that is what one does, and this inaccurate rhetoric about these scumbag landlords, and that your essentially pissing away your money and your wealth because you’re paying off their mortgage, rather than building equity in yourself.

    Now this might’ve been accurate like 100 years ago, or 15 years ago before bitcoin was invented.

    But once again, if a huge paradigm fundamental shift happens, obviously you should not use past technologies because it is no longer pertinent.

    For example, you see it today. In the year 2024, we already have the Tesla model S plaid, which will destroy any other mainstream car on the planet, even if it’s like $10 million. Yet why don’t people just go fully electric for electric vehicle sports or hyper cars? Once again people are stuck in old analogies.

    There’s really no reason to own a single-family home anymore?

    This past weekend, we had the privilege of doing a home exchange, and staying in this really really amazing home in the mountains overlooking the San Diego coastline, I woke up every morning enjoying my morning coffee, with a window next to me, overlooking some beautiful Torrey Pines, and also having the privilege of having the light directly enter through the window and hit my face.

    And also, going to the patio, to overlook in the ocean first thing in the morning, with the light directly on me. 

    It was kind of like my dream house or home, I always had this vision of having maximum natural light in the house, the living room and the kitchen, floor to ceiling windows etc. And now having experienced it, for four mornings in a row, I could say it was phenomenal, but still… Not really worth $2 million or whatever.

    New strategies for wealth generation for millennials

    so, I’m born in 1988, and I could probably say that I’m a millennial. Yet the tricky thing is that we’re kind of in a weird spot right now; currently there is a pressure to buy a single-family home?

    I think things changed after Covid, like nobody was interested in homeownership, everyone wanted to travel to Japan and be off the grid, become a digital or a cyber nomad etc.

    Everyone wants this nebulous notion of “financial independence.” What is financial independence? Bitcoin!

    My simple thought about financial independence is not being held down by anything, whether that be homeownership, land ownership, condo ownership, car ownership etc. Because you become like an indentured servant a slave a sharecropper to your land. Why? If you’re going to have to pay property tax like $1500 a month, plus home insurance stuff etc. costing you maybe $2300 a month, and also a mortgage which might in total cost you about $7000 a month, this seems like slavery.

    > Home ownership is the new share cropping.

    Also a subtle nuance I’ve discovered, is that there is actually some sort of low-key shame about renting? No! If you have a good landlord, rent control and live in a desirable neighborhood, this is like the smartest economic leverage you can make! 

    Think digital, cyber land. 

    Perhaps one of my most beneficial things of studying sociology is wiping the slate clean, thinking things anew and afresh. 

    In fact, the number one thing that you learn is sociology is to always challenge societal norms and assumptions; taking it back to first principles, social first principles, sociological first principles. 

    There is no “should”

    Once again, the ground truth for much of society is that if you want the ability happiness and smartness, you must have stability, you must own a single-family home, you must own a home or property.

    But once again this ideology was invented before the internet, iPhones, and $50 android devices. And certainly before Bitcoin!

    The network effect

    Do you remember, in the early days of Facebook. It was only it was only university students with an “.edu” address were allowed to join. Then they opened up to everybody, and the network effect of Facebook is that if you have Facebook and I have Facebook, then Facebook instantly becomes more valuable to both of us, because I can now share my photos with you, you could tag me in your photos and vice versa.

    Also if your friends friends also have Facebook, it becomes much more valuable to everyone.

    The same thing goes with the iPhone and FaceTime. I used to be a diehard android guy, but now I’m all iCloud everything. It makes life so much easier, and also because I wanted to get my mom off of the stupid Kakaotalk, I got my mom an iPhone, and now our whole family has iMessage which makes like way easier.

    Bitcoin is the killer app. Bitcoin is like metaphorical FaceTime for all 8 billion people on the planet. 

    And so Bitcoin is going to be the same thing as more and more people are going to continue to download Coinbase or whatevs. And also my optimistic thought is, if Apple doesn’t want to become irrelevant, it’s I’m very certain the next 5 to 10 years Apple is going to have their own
    Bitcoin storage thing in your icloud account. It makes sense right. They have apple pay. They have the apple wallet. Essentially Apple is the new bank. And so now, when they do like a you know, a 3 device authentication for your bitcoins through your iphone, your ipad and your macbook pro whatevers. It’s actually it might actually be one of the most safe ways to store your bitcoins.

    MicroStrategy might be the most valuable company on the planet, the #1 most valuable company on the planet 

    The reason why the mainstream media they doesn’t like to talk about microstrategy is that it’s still a little bit too weird and bizarre. And it’s not as buzzworthy as AI, because, okay, people like to think of this like evil Terminator AI, the idea that AI is going to take over the world.

    Bitcoin doesn’t have the same doomsday view; for example you never think of bitcoin like being an android walking around, taking over the planet.

    AI gets a lot more buzz, because James Cameron and the Terminator made it so cinematic.

    Ponzi scheme

    For so long people thought that Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme right. No one ever thought that AI was a Ponzi scheme. So AI always catches the headlines.

    But look at microstrategy, look at the best performing stock on the human unit in the human universe over 3x.

    For example, people always talk about Nvidia, but micro strategies out performing Nvidia by almost 3X! down the line Nvidia is destroying Tesla. And after that, nobody is even relevant.

    Cyber physics

    So my practical physics-based thought is that the reason why AI Nvidia, producing computer chips, self driving cars and cybertrucks is so difficult is that you’re still stuck in the realm of physics. To build 1 million cybertrucks is difficult, and also, building 1 billion micro processing chips is also difficult. You are subjected to the laws of entropy, chaos, supply chain issues, Rare earth minerals, regulations, and physical heat loss etc.

    What is so amazing about bitcoin is that because it exists in cyberspace, yet is also real, it is not really bound by the same laws of physics. There is no heat loss in a bitcoin, and also it is immortal.

    For example, a cybertruck might last 100 years, a bitcoin will last 100 trillion years and beyond. 

    Invest in cyber!

    Politics

    I used to be anti-Donald Trump, but now I’m super for Donald Trump and his whole family. Also for ERIC Trump. Who hilariously has the same name as me.

    Anyways, just watched Donald Trump’s Nashville presentation he quotes Michael sailor directly, never sell your bitcoin.

    Donald Trump is super super pro bitcoin.

    Cyber warfare

    There will be no more World War III, the only future war will be a cyber warfare, maybe like bitcoin warfare.

    I am quite certain that America will lead the charge in the crypto bitcoin revolution. 

    Assuming that America really wants to control the future. I think the America purchasing 6 million bitcoins is not fully out of this this planet.

    The American ethos is we always want to be the best, to control everything. Wouldn’t it make sense for us to own like 25% of the bitcoin network? Ideally more?

    Building personal family wealth

    Everyone wants to build wealth. Everyone wants to be intelligent with their investing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nonprofit, a charity, a church, Mother Teresa, like every single organization, will always need money. Capital. If you have an endowment, you know, for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford Brown University. Whatever even the UC’s– everyone needs money and capital.

    Even for the people who seem to be the most disinterested in money, my funny irony that I’ve noticed is that the people who critique money, money rich money greedy people, they are the ones who often complain the most about their own financial distress.

    Therefore, wealth will benefit everybody, it will benefit you, your enemy, your friends your family.

    Don’t think about the macro

    I don’t like to think too much about the macro, because I’m not an institutional investor. I just think about myself, my family, my best friends, my squad. So the goal is building personal family wealth and how to intelligently invest.

    Not even god can time the market

    So a lot of people talk about timing. The ideal is people don’t want to “overpay” for bitcoin, and they want to find a good time to buy.

    My personal thought is it is always a good time to buy Bitcoin. At the highs the lows the mids etc. If you go to saylortracker.com, you’ll see the Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy has purchased bitcoin like over 45 times, like 45 distinct events, at the highs the lows the mids, the crashes the highs etc. 

    For myself too, whenever I gain any access to money or capital, I immediately purchase more bitcoins, irregardless of the price. If anything I am more opportunistic when I see the price dip a bit, this is when I get greedy in a virtuous way. 

    So recently I bought some more Bitcoin at $100,000. Right then it dipped down to 90,000 to 88,000 hit 103,000 again, and so I’m pretty sure that in 10-20 years I’m going to be buying Bitcoin at 1 million, a Bitcoin, 10 million dollars a Bitcoin, 55 million dollars a Bitcoin, whatever is right, and because if you do the simple math, just think at least 4 years ahead, right?

    $1.2 million a bitcoin in 4 years 

    So if I could tell you with 100% certainty that Bitcoin is going to be $1.2 million a Bitcoin in 4 years, as long as you’re buying it for less than a million dollars a coin you’re getting a good deal! You’re going to be in the green like it’s it’s kind of a a good bet, right?

    No need to “maximize o your gains

    Good greed vs bad greed?

    And actually, also, ironically, my personal thought is
    chasing gains is a good thing, but also it’s it’s a good idea to not get “greedy” in the sense of maximizing your gains.

    So for example, what’s the difference between getting a 38% yield and a 32% yield? The difference is nominal.

    Don’t worry so much about maximization, because even a lot of what I thought my trades were bad 2 years ago ended up being right.

    So as investors, we have to think at least 4, 10, 20, 40, 50 years ahead of us. So don’t worry so much about the the short term performance.

    The ERIC KIM BLEND

    There’s a lots of different blends.

    First you could just put 100% of your capital directly in bitcoin, just using Coinbase or whatever.

    Another strategy is just putting 100% of your money into microstrategy stock directly. 

    My personal suggestion is put 80% of your wealth into Bitcoin and 20% of your wealth into microstrategy MSTR stock.

    The reason why I think this is a good split and a good ratio is that technically bitcoin is a lot safer than microstrategy. But, it is good to leverage the nuclear reactor of microstrategy, and not only that, I love Michael Saylor! He is the only living man on the planet besides my friends and family that I love; because he has made me richer than I could have ever possibly have imagined, has brought happiness joy peace and prosperity to my family, to my relationship with Cindy, and also for the bright future of our family and Seneca.

    The math 

    So whatever allotment you decide to put into bitcoin versus microstrategy, let us just focus on the microstrategy stock. 
    To keep number simple let us say that I have $150,000 worth of microstrategy MSTR stock. And let us say that micro strategy climbs to around to be worth $200,000. Well then do is sell about $50,000 worth of the stock, transfer that to my bank account, and then purchase bitcoins worth $50,000 using my Coinbase account which is linked to my checking account.

    I call this double profits. 

    Expenses

    Let us say that you are like a single millennial who wants to live off the grid, ideally you would just live somewhere that is super super cheap, like Cambodia Thailand Vietnam Laos, somewhere in Southeast Asia. Ideally you would not spend much for your living expenses.

    Let us say that you relocate to Vietnam and your entire expenses including your rent utilities eating out food coffee etc. is like $1000 a month.

    But then you do is at the every month when your bills are due, you just sell about $1000 worth of microstrategy stock, pay your bills and keep the rest!

    To me this is like the smartest idea of all time because in theory, you will never run out of money!

    This could also work if you live in the states, but once again friends, let us keep our living expenses to the bare minimum. I encourage everyone to rent. Why? Renting will always be cheaper than owning a single-family home or a condo, and you could just use all of the excess money to buy more bitcoins!

    What’s the difference between being an investor, a trader vs speculator?

    I believe that the desired identity is to be an investor. We want to think about 10, 20, 30 40-50 years ahead of us.

    A trader (or even worse,a day trader) is a bunch of these, like 20 year old high testosterone degenerates, you know, single, you know, maybe addicted drugs, or whatever right, who just want to like look cool. I made a billion dollars in a month by using all these complicated statistical models. Blah! Blah! Right? But you don’t want to be a trader or a day trader. You don’t want to be a trader because essentially nobody could time the market. Not even God could time the market.

    Speculators are even worse?

    What a speculator is people who invest in meme coins. So a meme coin is like buying a Dogecoin or shiba Inu, that the reason why these are not you should not do this is that it is extremely dangerous. You’re going to lose all your money, and it requires a charismatic leader to support it.

    So Dogecoin, right? Dogecoin is essentially elon musk coin.
    If one day Elon musk tweets. Ha! Ha! Doge was just a joke all along, right. It’s not worth anything. The value of it will plummet to 0, or if once again, Elon dies in a a robo taxi the The value of dogecoin is going to go to 0, whereas if Elon Musk dies, you know Bitcoin is going to still keep going up forever.

    We’re investors.

    Nobody brags about how many US dollars they have in their checking account


    Somebody asked about monetary inflation. There’s this thing called the M2 monetary supply — the rate of monetary inflation and dollar printing.

    You’re going to have to exceed at least 13% to 15% to
    not lose money. So, for example, let us say, you have a billion dollars of US dollars in your checking account. You’re going to be bled to death. So in a year, your 1 billion dollars is going to shrink to 750 million down to 500 million, to 350 million. And essentially, you’re going to get a point where your money is worthless.

    And already we see this right now. So currently, the price of real estate, single family homes is exploding. But this is my critical view– how much of that is that the value of a single family house is higher versus our US. Dollars are just simply worthless or being worth less?

    So let us say that the minimum wage goes from $15 an hour to $20 an hour overnight for a Mcdonald’s worker. You instantly see 25% inflation. So your $1 million dollars in the bank is now worth only $750,000.

    The real real rich people store less than 1% of their wealth in Us. Dollars in their checking account. You’re not gonna have Jeff Bezos bragging to other people that he has $10 billion dollars of US dollars in his checking account. No, it’s it’s all going to be in you know, stocks, or, you know, real estate. And actually, ideally, Bitcoin. Cyber cyber capital.

    Now what?

    Follow @saylor, Michael Saylor on TwitterX, Michael.com, watch all of the Michael Saylor interviews in reverse (most recent, then trending backwards). I feel like from listening to Michael Saylor alone I got like a double PhD in physics and monetary theory.

    Ultimately the path forward is to just keep buying more bitcoins, and never selling it.

    I also then encourage you to think more critically about like life in the backwards; if you’re already worth $100 million, or $1 billion, then what? How do you want to live your life? What do you want to do, what don’t you want to do? This is the next step forward!

    ERIC


  • Introduction to Bitcoin Transcript

    So the Bitcoin revolution, the revolution will be televised. So, starting off.

    First, what is Bitcoin? Why does it matter?

    So I think the 1st important critical thing is trying to consider and think you know what is Bitcoin we’ve all heard about in the news we heard about Bitcoin as being a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. And honestly, my mom has gone through her fair share of Ponzi schemes like she she got suckered by the whole Amway scam.

    I think the reason why Bitcoin is so important and critical is, Bitcoin is like the early days of the Internet. So if you go into a time machine and you could tell somebody in the past, okay, you know, in the days before email existed. Right? So okay, once one day, you know, everyone’s gonna have a supercomputer in their pocket. They’re using it to check all their bank statements. You’re going to be able to use your camera on your phone to scan your you know your checks, your bank account balances. You can use this to send money and messages and videos to everyone on the planet. Instantly everyone would have thought you were crazy.
    and I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin.

    So a constructive way of thinking about bitcoin is trying to figure out what bitcoin is not.

    My personal opinion is, I do not think that Bitcoin is actually cryptocurrency. I think currency is the Us. Dollar, and I think one of the biggest problems about the whole field of crypto and cryptocurrency is everyone is like a crypto anarchist, which means that they want to see the Us. Government and all the governments on the planet fail, and they can essentially live in peace and silent without interference from the Government.

    Yet, you know, obviously, at the end of the day, it’s nice to have public streets. It’s nice to not get robbed in the streets. And actually, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin is. People think that Bitcoin is trying to replace the Us. Dollar.

    But my personal thought is, Bitcoin is going to be a supplement to the Us. Dollar.

    Essentially, I thought this a long time ago that essentially Bitcoin is digital gold to hedge against inflation, which means, as our money, our Us. Dollars, or our euros, or our local currencies become devalued.

    The upside is, our Bitcoin will become more valuable. I think the best analogy that I got was from chairman of microstrategy mstr Michael saylor, essentially thinking that Bitcoin is is not digital currency, but digital
    real estate.

    So I think this analogy is better, because nobody’s on their zillow, you know, 20 times a day, checking their home prices right? And this is my mad Max Post Apocalyptic perspective. So imagine the future where there’s, you know, essentially
    there’s this like nuclear fallout. And you know.
    there’s no inhabitable places anywhere. And let us say, there’s only 21 million single family homes left on the planet for anybody to live. Obviously, sooner or later, you know, people are going to want somewhere to live. And so I think the best analogy, I think, is Bitcoin as digital real estate, which means that with digital real estate.

    Monetizing Bitcoin?

    You know, a lot of people are like– I want to quickly make money off of Bitcoin. But how do I make money off of it? It’s kind of like the early days of real estate. So if you bought Manhattan in the 1600s, you know, how do you monetize it? And I still think that we’re in the very, very early days of bitcoin and institutional adoption, which means you’re going to start to see New Bitcoin products come out. So some simple thoughts. So we’ve all heard stories of Scumbag San Francisco based scumbag landlords, you know, charging an arm and a leg for their tenants, and we all hate the landlords, I think with Bitcoin we’ll become the new digital landlords, which means effectively, we will in the future be able to like rent out our Bitcoin. And you know, let’s say we have one bitcoin right, and it’s and then I think that the personal math I like to do in my head is thinking that one Bitcoin is equivalent to one single family home. So I currently live in Los Angeles, in Culver City. It’s kind of insane. A single family home. I’ve even seen some in my neighborhood for 4.4 million dollars. The average Median household single family home is around 1.7 million dollars.

    So in my personal mind, where I think Bitcoin is a trillion times more valuable than physical real estate land, because you could always make more of it. It’s not a real scarcity.

    A single family home, and the price of a Bitcoin should be pegged to another.

    So in my mind I still think of a Bitcoin at least 1.1
    1.7 2.1, maybe even 4.4 million dollars a coin. And I think this is a very very fascinating idea, because also, you know, people say, Oh, but Bitcoin is not real. Money is yeah, but like our dead, shiny rocks. Aka. Gold money either, or is fiat currency, you know pieces of paper. You cannot eat pieces of paper to to live. And I think one of the most interesting things I learned about the philosophy of money is that essentially all money is just existing in the minds and souls of men, the value for men, is all essentially subjective.

    Money is not “real”, but subjective.

    Now, what makes Bitcoin so fascinating to me is that it’s the 1st time in human existence, you had a hard cap supply of money.

    So, for example, people often talk about gold, right? So the issue with gold is at the time it was the least bad form of money, because it was very, very scarce. It was difficult to find. It’s difficult to mine and transport. Yet there was lots of good properties of gold. It’s, you know, essentially it kind of lasts forever. Aesthetically, it looks beautiful, the nice yellow color of gold mimics that of the sun, and you know, at least back in the day, let’s say you had gold coins it could easily fit in your front pocket whatevers.

    But now things become a lot more difficult because we’re living in the 21st century, the 22nd century you know, we would have flying car drone robo taxi, self driving car waymos. It’s like, Why are we still using an antiquated digital framework of modern day banking swift code accounts?

    I hate the banks

    If you’ve ever tried to send money, you know, from the Netherlands to South Korea, to Nigeria, to Lagos whatever you find that the the whole SWIFT system is kind of like a bunch of gangster mafiosas like even my mom is currently living in South Korea.

    Example if I want to just send my mom a small sum of money, it is insane,  it takes like three or four days, and the wire transfer fees like 55 bucks, I hate this. This should be done instantly. Therefore the thought of bitcoin, being able to quickly and effectively and securely transfer value across time and space without a trusted intermediary is a big big deal, a big big revolution.

    Peer to Peer Capital

    So why does Bitcoin matter? It’s kind of like asking somebody why does clean water matter so one of the things I love about Michael Saylor, and I highly recommend watching all of his videos. @wsaylor. It’s essentially Twitter or X or michael.com.

    He uses this analogy of sewer water. So let us say, every all 8 billion people on the planet are all drinking sewer water, and people are dying of dysentery, and people are saying, I don’t get it, you know I exercise, you know. I
    you know I eat healthy exercise every day, but I’m still dying of dysentery. My kids are dying of dysentery, and so the whole issue is that if you’re drinking sewer water, no matter how healthy your lifestyle is, how virtuous you is. It don’t matter. You’re going to be, you know, dying of dysentery, or perpetually sick.

    And so, if we think about these physiological terms, and apply it to Bitcoin and money and digital capital. This becomes really fascinating because my personal thought and you know, also, I grew up in a family of poverty, poverty, meaning that I thought I was going to be homeless at least 2 or 3 times. My dad was perpetually addicted to gambling with the rent money.

    So what a lot of people don’t understand about growing up in poverty, and prosody is that the logical strategy that you never know when your dad is going to steal your money and gamble it away, and therefore the smart strategy is actually to spend it all right now! Because you never know when he’s going to look in your piggy bank, your personal checking account that your mom put away for your college, or even take your hard earned $3000 as a 15-year-old bus boy at your mom sushi restaurant, lying that you’re going to invest in some business, leaving to LA for about a month, gambling it away, and coming back empty.

    When I think about it, this is actually super sad. Once again when I was like super super young like two years old, my mom tried to make me a savings account, like one of those checking or savings investing accounts for kids, and she might’ve had a nominal amount of money in it, like 200 or 250 bucks or something. And she told me the sad news is that one day when she checked up on it she discovered that the money was gone. Essentially my dad even stole away that $250 from my child savings account for college, once again feed his gambling addiction.

    The logic 

    So once again, as a kid growing up, I never had this ethos or tactic of saving. Because we literally cannot come every dime that my mom made was fun into paying for groceries and rent.

    Therefore I like a 15-year-old kid, my thought was I’m going to take every single penny, I can immediately go out buying some new sneakers, you know, buy some cool clothes, and I literally had $0 in my bank account.

    Don’t blame poor people

    So I think the pernicious, vicious cycle of inflation is.

    You cannot blame people for not saving up capital for their future if the money itself is deflating at such a rapid pace, and so I personally think that you know Bitcoin is like giving every single person on the planet like unlimited free Fiji water, or the best alkaline hipster water whatever water you want. Essentially giving people clean water. And
    a lot of people say, Yeah, but Bitcoin is not real money. It’s a okay. So I think this is a big this is a big shift for me also, personally.

    My personal thought is, Bitcoin is actually more important than money.

    Capital > Money

    So we should not think about money. We should think about capital. I think capital is a lot more robust and strong as a concept. So, for example, capital comes from Cap CAP. Like upon your head. K-ap. Essentially it came from the head of oxen. So if you read the Iliad, the Odyssey essentially, every time you want to appease the gods, you have to sacrifice a hectacomb, Hecta means 100 a hundred head of oxen to appease the gods.

    And you know, obviously, that’s very expensive, like, can you imagine, if you know you sacrificed a hundred Lamborghinis to appease the gods, it would be quite expensive endeavor. Right?

    And so, capital. We all live under Capitalism — it doesn’t matter if you’re living in Europe, Africa, Asia, America, China, and also one thing that people don’t understand is, I think, what a lot of these people, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, China is going to take over. China’s not going to take over. China is dependent on America, and effectively, the Chinese Yuan the CNY is essentially effectively pegged to the Us. Dollar and the Us. The US is essentially the world. Reserve currency and capital is what we seek, not money.

    Currency?

    Talking about currency, so currency is like, you know, buying a Starbucks Frappuccino, or buying a in and out Burger. Right? That’s like money currency, right?

    Capital is essentially long storm, long term, store of value. So it’s building generational wealth.

    So one of my favorite songs from Kanye West is the off the grid songs that we off the grid grid grid this for my kid, kids, for when my kids, kids have kids.

    And I think this is also the big thing is a lot of millennials, nowadays, I think the disincentive to have kids is because there’s so much fear mongering about the the future is gonna become uninhabitable, you know boil the seas or whatever. So there’s not going to be a future. So essentially, there’s a strong sense of pessimism.

    But Bitcoin, to me is like solidified optimism, which means that the future is going to be glorious and great. And you know, even having Seneca right now, think about his future kids, kids, kids, or my future kids, kids, kids.
    It brings me so much joy. Because the simple strategy, you just keep stacking Bitcoin until you die, and then you hand it on to your kids. Your kids give it to their kids kids. It’s like, if you owned, you know, a hundred penthouses or 10 square blocks or 20 square blocks in Manhattan, on the main island. Do you ever sell that to buy a Lamborghini? No! That’s not what one does, or liquefy it all into us dollars and brag about how many billions of dollars you have in your bank account.

    Nope, that’s not the goal– you want to build capital. And traditionally it’s been real estate. But once again, real estate was a good idea. In the 16 hundreds, 17 hundreds, 18 hundreds, 19 hundreds, or 2000s. But then the subprime mortgage meltdown proved that, you know maybe it’s not always the best idea.

    Real estate can go down.

    Only one reason

    And I think the hard thing is, people say, Yeah, but you know, real estate, you know, essentially, everyone needs somewhere to live, and it’s historically, the value of real estate is always going to go up forever. Now people say that the tricky thing is the pace of monetary inflation is around 15%. The best thing is to either chat Gpt or Google The M2 Money Supply. And essentially what you will find is
    that the money supply is essentially a metric in which the Us. Government, or any other government on the planet, includes the euro and stuff. They keep printing more currency. And the reason why then this becomes an issue is that if you have more currency in the system that means the individual value of each unit is going to go down.

    The shake shack effect

    I call this the shake Shack Burger incident. So me and Seneca we used to always buy a single burger, patty, for $1.49, $1.50 … and one day we come and they say no it is $2.50, a party.

    Why this makes no sense is like, yeah, we just increased the minimum wage to $20 an hour from $15 an hour. $20 an hour for fast food, and the hard thing is with minimum wage. You cannot rewind the the hands of time. If you suddenly said that the minimum wage is only $17 an hour, there will be riots. The streets would not be not be good.

    Bitcoin is digital photography

    So we’re all photographers, you know, street photographers, whatever. And the hard thing with digital is in our minds, digital is infinite and free. So, for example, I could take a copy of Mozart’s 5th Symphony, or whatever, as an mp3, file, and I could copy and distribute it a trillion times with 0 marginal cost right?

    So this is where the notion of cyber becomes more interesting. And I’ll think about like, you know, cyber punk thinking about cyber truck.

    It’s essentially once again, mathematically, cryptographically, that the hard science and the hard math is there can never be more than 21 million coins
    in existence come up forever. Even if you took all the quantum ultra computers on the planet, times it by 20, you still could not produce more bitcoins. It’s just how it works right?

    The immortal gold cyber oxen

    One Bitcoin is like one cyber-ox, and it’s immortable, immortal, indestructible. It’ll give you life forever. And there’s only gonna be 21 million of them in the future. And now and so this is your chance to get one for an extreme discount.

    Buying a single-family home in Los Angeles for only $100,000 

    Let’s even say let’s say you want to buy a single family home. Let’s say it costs a million euros or whatever. Right? So if I could tell you today that you could buy a single family home for only $100,000 or €100,000 you’d be like, wow, that’s that’s the deal of a century. That’s you’re still getting a 90% discount.

    And my personal thought is Bitcoin is far more valuable than real estate, because in the next 20-30 years, when essentially all the all the baby boomers, The Gen. Xers die off, and it’s the millennials and Gen. Z’s. And, alphas!

    What do we care for?

    When we millennials take over, what’s interesting is that we don’t really care about physical real estate anymore. We will care about digital cyber real estate which is bitcoin. 

    So my personal story, how did I get into Bitcoin? So it might seem a little bit random. It’s like, Okay, ERIC, you’re super famous for photography, street photography like, how do you get to Bitcoin like? It’s like, so random, right? But actually, it’s not very random at all, because, you know, if you’ve been following me carefully, you know the whole time, I’ve always been talking about living minimalistically, frugally, Spartan lifestyle, whatever’s. And you know now that you know I’m pretty stacked with a bitcoin and microstrategy stock mstr.

    Funny enough, I’ve personally found that my lifestyle habits haven’t changed much after getting super rich, I mean, I’m a little bit more generous, maybe, like, you know, took out a friend last night to all you eat Korean barbecue
    paid for her bill didn’t really even flinch.

    Even a random aside, my best friend and my best man Justin, told me this when we were like in our early 20s, when we finally got good paying jobs whatever, is that the greatest joy is being able to eat out and not really feel the pain associated with having to eat out because we both grew up poor. 

    I still remember even when I was undergraduate at UCLA, after our KYRIE club meeting, we would all go out to eat, and then I would see all the other guys ordering these really expensive $15 Korean barbecue gogi plates, (this was in 2006, when you could still buy a foot-long sub sandwich for five bucks), and $1.99 tacos, and $1 tacos, and me trying to save money, would force myself not to eat even though I was hungry, and my friends would ask me if I was hungry and I would lie, and say I wasn’t, while my stomach was still grumbling. 

    Monetary, financial freedom is the goal

    So my personal thought with Bitcoin is, I personally wanted monetary freedom, and so long story short, so I’ll never forget this moment. So I’m born 1988. Went to UCLA as an undergrad — my roommate at the time, Kevin. It’s our junior he’s on Reddit, and I’ll never forget we’re in our studio apartment. I think I was distracted. I was doing something else. He was like Eric, you know. He’s on some subreddit, and he’s like.

    “Oh, Eric, this thing called Bitcoin, and there’s this one dude who just bought two domino’s pizzas for like 10,000 bitcoins. We should just get like a hundred bucks worth of bitcoin, and just see what happens.”

    I then responded “Eh, seems like a scam” and disregarded it. No this is one bitcoin was like less than a penny, so even if me and Kevin and my roommate Kevin, just bought a hundred bitcoins at the time for funsies, right? And I had a hundred bucks right? We would each be worth at least 1.2 billion dollars.

    If I had bought $100 worth of bitcoin at the time, once again we would each have about $1.2 billion in our checking accounts.

    Everything happens as it should have happened 

    Today, I’m like, man. This was like the worst mistake of my life, right? But everything has happened as it should have happened. You know. Maybe if I had become a billionaire I’d just become some degenerate, you know. Cocaine addict on some beach somewhere in in Hawaii, and then Seneca would never been born. I would have never done my photography, world travels, whatevers.

    Then my reintroduction to Bitcoin was kind of more recently when moving to LA. The cost of living is so expensive, and you know every I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want financial freedom. A long story short, I 1st heard about Bitcoin again, kind of earlier than when I was living in Vietnam around 2017, 2018, and at the time I didn’t really need Bitcoin, because our living expenses were so cheap. It was $320 bucks a month for a brand new studio apartment, fully furnished up, uplighting and the jazz right? And even at the time, passively, the income we’re making. Let’s say it’s a $1000- $2,000 a month. Let’s say it’s not even that much right, but like our whole total expenses, living expenses like maybe $600-700 a month, so I had the epiphany I’m like, I’m never going to run out of money. So already, at the age of 26 in my mind, I mentally retired right
    and just more for funsies.

    Buying bitcoin for $6,999 a Bitcoin

    I met this guy named Bing in Singapore. Heard about this thing called Digibyte. Dgb, I don’t even think they’re around anymore. But at the time I’m like, Okay, I want to buy some bitcoins, buy some digibyte. How do I do this? And at the time Coinbase seemed like the best option, because it was the simplest, most minimalist to me it looked like the paypal for for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

    For fun I bought about $25,000 worth of bitcoin, which, and Bitcoin was only about $7,000, $6,999 a bitcoin. So that was around 3.5 bitcoins. 

    I then traded some bitcoin for digibyte, and I kept some bitcoin in my Coinbase account. Then the next few years I essentially saw the waves and the crashes and the dogecoins and stuff like that.

    And essentially, I just kind of woke up to my guts and found out that Bitcoin was a real deal.

    Satoshi is the Bitcoin Jesus

    Some strange analogies is to me Bitcoin is almost like a new
    World economic religion, I mean, people who follow Bitcoin are like fanatic. They’re zealous about it. They follow Michael Saylor like he’s like you know the prophet. You know the next prophet of Bitcoin right?

    And it’s always good to invest in religions or to invest in cults like the cult of Tesla, Elon Musk apple, Steve Jobs. Whatevs, right?

    Why?

    Now obviously, I have financial independence now, and the only reason I’m teaching this workshop or sharing this information is, I almost feel like it’s my ethical imperative. Once again, if you could have discovered internet in the early days, or clean drinking water, I would feel that it would almost be a disservice if I did not share this information with others.

    Future value

    So everyone’s always about like, okay, so what is the Bitcoin gonna be worth? So there’s the open source model. Michael Saylor, I think, helped create it. It’s called the Bitcoin 21 model, I think. Right?

    So 21 years from now his base case is that Bitcoin is going to be $13 million a Bitcoin. Bear case, $3 million a Bitcoin. The bull case is $49 million a Bitcoin, and note, this was in 2024 in July before Trump was announced as President, and he is ultra super pro crypto and bitcoin and also worth following, is his son Eric Trump, ironically. His name is also Eric also the funny thing. There’s a bunch of Eric’s actually in the world of Bitcoin, Eric Kim Eric Semler, of semler scientific, this other Etf guy who works for Bloomberg. His name is Eric Balconus, or something like that.

    Follow Eric Trump

    Essentially, we have an all Republican trump, pro bitcoin pro crypto, President and cabinet, whatever right?

    More bullish

    What is really fascinating about Michael Saylor’s predictions for the future price of bitcoin is that when it was only $65,000 a bitcoin, and we were a bit uncertain about what the future of bitcoin and the president and the government would look like.

    The last four years, we were all fighting an uphill battle, because the former administration was adamantly anti-crypto and anti-bitcoin. Gary Gensler who seems like a smart guy, was for some reason really anti-bitcoin and crypto? 

    The next four years will be glorious!

    And so these were all written by Michael Saylor’s predictions before we had the most pro bitcoin
    government of all time. So all these numbers, I think, should be inflated. So my personal thought is, I think, for the next 4 years once Trump takes office, January 20, 2025. I think this will be the craziest, best Bitcoin Bull Run of all time the next 4 years. So currently, Bitcoin’s been going up around 60% to 62% arr annual rate of return. And I think once Trump takes office, and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna buy the 1 million Bitcoins, or whatever for the strategic American Reserve.

    And also I think Eric Trump, his son, is committed to having Bitcoin be at least a million in Bitcoin.

    120% Bitcoin ARR for the next 4 years

    So let’s see. So my personal prediction, right? So I think Bitcoin will grow by at least 120% arr over the next 4 years. So let’s say, Bitcoin is worth around $100,000 right now. So by next year, let’s say it’s $250,000 the year after that, let’s say it’s $750,000, let’s say the year after that it’s like $1.2 million. So I think we’re on track to hit a million a bitcoin in 4 years about 10x gain. So just do the math from then.

    The $1 million dollar cybertruck

    Currently as an account measure, I now equate one bitcoin being worth one cyber truck, assuming that a cyber truck is currently around $100,000.

    So the smart strategy is to take your hundred thousand dollars and invest it into bitcoin today, and you’ll see that becoming $1 million in four years. 

    What that means is sell your cyber truck for $100,000, buy bitcoin, otherwise you have just done spent $1 million on your cyber loser truck.

    Cyber warfare 

    Now, people are always asking, okay, this, you know, Bitcoin reserve strategy, you know, like, how is? And why is America going to buy the Bitcoins? Right? So we’re essentially out of physical land and real estate. Now we have to go to cyberspace right?

    And it seems kind of silly, like something out of a sci-fi film. But the truth is, they’re currently the war we’re having with China and Russia. It’s it’s not physical war per se. It’s actually cyber war. So cyber security is the big big money maker. Even cyber penetration testing. Right? I think Gmail is trying to get like all these malicious actors trying to attack the Gmail servers like a million times a minute. Something crazy, right?

    And if you look at the history of America, right? So, Manhattan, 1600s, the price of Manhattan. It was essentially stolen from the natives. Right? 60 guilders, right Louisiana purchase, you know, to fund Napoleon, California. Also kind of stolen from the the local Mexicans right? And also Alaska right. The the payoff was great, right, and so essentially the Bitcoin Act, the Cynthia Lummis Bill, she’s trying to get the States to buy at least a million bitcoins right? And you know even a Michael Saylor is much more aggressive. He’s like no America should at least purchase maybe 5 or 6 million bitcoins, which is 20 to 25% of the whole Bitcoin supply. And all America has to do is a free trade. They just need to sell their gold and then buy Bitcoin. And in a recent interview that I was listening from Saylor.
    super fascinating, is like
    essentially what he said was the super evil genius strategy of selling America, selling her gold reserves and buying Bitcoin is that if that’s the case, comma.
    we demonetize our enemies.
    you know, capital reserves. So then suddenly, the the gold of the Russians, the Chinese, will go to 0, and then everyone’s going to rush into Bitcoin. And if America owns Bitcoin, it’s a good sign for the future. And also another big thing I want to talk about. Why does America have the best economy on the planet.
    So we essentially gave birth to Apple Amazon, Facebook, the magnificent 7 stocks, Netflix. And you know, people talk about China. It’s like. Okay, I don’t know a single rich mainland Chinese oligarch who doesn’t want to send their kids to the States to
    to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, you know, buy a nice house in Palo Alto, the Bay area, or even Vancouver. No rich mainland Chinese person actually wants to be in China, but because of capital controls, they’re kind of stuck. So once there’s going to be a mad rush to Bitcoin. That means that you, your family, your whole squad, is going to prosper now.
    you know, issues. My, my friend Dante had a question about storage. So
    I think the hard thing with storage is okay. So how do you say this?
    I, my, this is my personal philosophy. The reason I do not personally trust cold storage for myself or more of these self custody options is that
    I know that I am very forgetful, and my biggest fear is, let’s say, I forget my passcode, or whatever is right to the Bitcoins. And or let’s say, my kids, kids can forget it right? Then boom like, you’re gonna be out like a hundred 1 million dollars. Right? So that’s that’s not fun, right? And so personally, I think the easiest is to just, you know, store it on the cloud. So, using a trusted custodian, whether it be coinbase. I think fidelity has their own services now.
    And the you know honestly, it seems like Coinbase is probably the best option coinbase.com, or you just download your iphone ipad. Whatever right is that you could also get a link with your biometric apple id data, whether it be face id or thumbprint. Whatevs right? So this way, it just feels much more secure. So
    for me, I would prefer an 80 to 85% optimal thing that is kind of dummy proof rather than take the 100 secure option which, because of user error, I might fail, and something that I personally learned is
    in terms of technology. And all these things in between
    seeking the simplest, most straightforward option
    that is least complicated is often the best solution. And the reason I would be very, very wary of a lot of these people promoting, you know, buying their hardware wallets. Whatever’s right, everyone has a buck to make. Everyone has a bitcoin to make. Everyone wants to make a few satoshis here and there.
    and so they’re trying to fear monger use. Oh, you’re gonna you know, Coinbase going to get hacked. And I’m like, no, I don’t think it is. It’s like, you know, back. It’s like essentially a Us. Government, you know, it’s essentially it’s traded on the the You know the Stock Exchange. It’s a American based company. I would. I would not trust anything outside of the States.
    But yeah, I would say, choose now, obviously, if you’re super, you know.
    quant genius, autistic genius, then do all the cold storage stuff. But if in doubt, just the simplest thing is, coinbase seems to be the best. Okay, so this is kind of my free money hack. So I call this microstrategy, strategy, mstr microstrategy versus bitcoin. And okay, so it’s very, very simple. So this becomes a philosophical debate. To say it short.
    I think the ultimate goal is to own Bitcoin, he or she, or the entities with the owners of the most Bitcoin shall win. And so for me, philosophically, you know, let us say that you could own, you know, 20 bitcoins, or you could own 2 million dollars worth of micro strategy. Mstr. Stock. Right?
    1020, 30 years from now, right?
    You’re going to actually outperform. You’re actually going to make more money from microstrategy stock than Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, historically, has been 60% to 62% AR annual rate of return micro strategies is almost double that 120 to 1, 25 AR. So if you actually want to maximize your returns. You just buy microstrategy stock mstr and bitcoin. Right? But the issues is, you know. Let us say that Michael Saylor gets shot. He gets killed. He
    you know, dies in a Cybertruck, whatever. Right? Then, it’s probably not going to be the world’s best future for microstrategy. So it’s actually much more risky. So if you want the least risky option, it’s just put all your money into Bitcoin right? And some millennial living strategies. Right? So the the simplest strategy I have. I call it the Spartan strategy. This is why I personally follow. Is you essentially try to live as minimally and frugally and sparse as you can, and just put literally 90% of your income into bitcoins right?
    And a free money hack I discovered. So, for example, let’s say you have $150,000 or €150,000. Right? And you know I’m not 100 sure how it works. If you’re a European. What is right. But you, you buy micro strategy stocks. So let’s say you buy, you know, 100,000 or $150,000 worth of it right? And Mstr, and you use fidelity, or robinhood, or whatever trading app you have. Right.
    And the strategy is simple. It’s whenever you know. Let us say the base case 150,000.
    Let’s say your microstrategy stock value then goes up to 200,000. Right?
    You sell $50,000 worth of it, and then you just transfer that to your bank account.
    and then your bank account is linked with your coinbase account. Then you just buy the Bitcoin right and rinse and repeat so very, very impressive over the last 3 months, I started with initial seed capital of around $150,000 in microstrategy stock
    off of that $150,000 right? And I haven’t even touched my principal. I yielded $242,000
    off of that initial 150,000 right? And also for traditional Roth, Roth, Ira retirement accounts. I put everything into microstrategy stock, and it is already like 3 x like, for example.
    My roth, Ira, just kind of randomly was like what $78,000, and then the course of 3 months. It’s like now, it’s like 230,000. It peaked at around 300,000. So it’s going to be a good future. And so the the very simple strategy. So let us say you’re able to get down your living expenses to let’s say
    you know, 5,000 bucks a month or €5,000 a month. Right?
    the point isn’t to just make a bunch of money and just go out and buy the Lambo. The the goal is actually to continue to live for good. If anything live more fully. People who says like, Oh, you know, you want to get rich, don’t care about money or whatever. If you’re a real real greedy, you know money, loving person. Actually, the optimal strategy is.
    you live, you know. You continue driving your old Toyota Prius, and just pour all of your money in Bitcoin, because really the truth is and this is my philosophical thought is, there’s almost nothing worth on the planet purchasing.
    Besides, Bitcoin is my philosophical thought. So and also some e even more super smart economic leverage. Right?
    So instead of paying an arm and a leg for rent in La or New York. Brooklyn, you just move to like Southeast Asia. Right you go. Move to Southeast Asia, live like a king, for like 300 500 bucks a month. Right? You just put all your money to Bitcoins right? So even if you had a modest savings, right, let’s say you had like $200,000, and you had microstrategy stock.
    let’s say every month of the month is rent is due, and the expenses are due right? You just sell a small portion of that stock, and it’s going to go up. So my thought on the next 4 years, micro strategy, assuming it’s around 2 x Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is going to go up 120% error. I think micro strategy is going to double that 240% error. So just do the masses. At the end of every single month
    you make a small. Your gains go up like crazy right, and let’s say your living expenses are like under a thousand bucks, or if you, if you live in the States, 5,000 bucks, you sell X amount of monies to just support your living expenses, and you just continue to ride your gains. But ultimately my personal thought is whatever excess, money and capital you have just put it onto Bitcoin. So the micro strategy then ends up becoming the engine or the turbocharger or the cash cow. You milk it, and you shave the cream off the top, and then you buy Bitcoin with it.
    So I think the reason why to me Bitcoin is such a fascinating thing, and very exciting, is essentially Bitcoin is digital photography. Peter Diamandis, the ex guy. Right? You know, he talks a lot about kodak film. You know the iphone and disruption.
    So actually, intuitively, as photographers and digital photographers, we should actually understand. You know, this disruptive power about digital photography. So obviously, you have the hipsters with their mustaches and their flannels, you know, talking about the virtues of film photography.
    But the truth is, digital photography is like a quadrillion times better.
    And also currently, in the year 2025, incoming
    digital photography is actually superior to film photography. I mean.
    maybe in the early days of digital sucked right. But now, at this point, digital photography is far superior to any sort of film photography, and the only reason you should film in today’s world
    is either as like a practice to appreciate the joys of photography. So the philosophical approach.
    or you know, you’re trying to be some sort of like, you know, snoppy fine art photographer and overcharge money for your photos. Then you shoot film.
    because honestly, the the fine art market, they’re always going to overvalue film photos over digital photos, because it’s more complicated. It’s more strange, right? So in the art, in the art world, the more complicated, abstruse, and complicated, you can make your art the better. But for us.
    where you care about practical things, yeah, think about Bitcoin. So think about the iphone iphone pro versus your mom’s kodak Browning camera. I think the the thought is obvious. Okay.
    so how to start buying Bitcoin. Very simple. Just download the coinbase app, or you know if you if you don’t want to actually own Bitcoin, you just want to make a ton of money, just buy micro strategy stock Mstr, and use your traditional
    accounts. And I still think that this is the biggest thing is that everyone wants to become a millionaire, right?
    But you know what I think people want to do is
    they don’t want to earn like, okay, okay.
    people want to spend a million dollars.
    They don’t want to actually save and build a million dollars right? And so if you think about, you know, money and
    capital digital capital, I think about like Lego bricks, right? I just went to Legoland. Senecall is great. So let us say that
    each bitcoin, or dollar or 1 million dollars like these. Let’s say these are Lego bricks right? The goal is, you want to build your Lego Tower brick thing as tall as possible. You don’t ever want to
    get rid of your bricks and throw into the trash. That’s essentially what consumerism is. And this is actually another big philosophical thing I discovered is, what’s the difference between capitalism and consumerism. Consumerism is actually the exact opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is about accumulating wealth.
    building your capital and not spend it right. Even one of my favorite Kanye quotes is like why people make money don’t spend it. But I’d rather buy 80 gold chains go ignorant, right ignorant. And so the pernicious thing that happens in a lot of communities, especially poor communities. Right? I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. Right?
    Happens to Korean people. It happens to everybody, right? Is that you know you live in a crappy apartment in K. Town with 20 other dudes. Yet you drive the brand new Bmw. And you’re not building any sort of generational wealth. Right? And so essentially, yeah, you want to build the capital and not spend it. And essentially, you want to start to intelligently leverage your capital
    to give to your future kids or your descendants, or whatever you want to do. Now, the hardest thing about Bitcoin is stomaching the volatility so volatile, mean. Just it goes up, it goes down, and then, like honestly for most people, it’s going to give them like 5. 100 heart attacks over right now
    I think of a Bitcoin kind of like nuclear energy, so
    nuclear energy in the untamed formed is obviously toxic could cause the next Fukushima whatevers right? But if you have a bunch of smart people, engineers, nuclear physicists working in a controlled manner, right? It’s like the greatest benefit to society, because to humanity, because essentially, you’re giving people free electricity forever. Right? And
    I think my personal thought is the volatility is a future not above. So the reason why Bitcoin goes up and down the sideways so much all the time, and you can have huge swings
    is because you could trade a 24, 7, 365 on the weekends in the evenings. Right?
    It still befuddles me that in the year 2024, 2025 like. Why is it that you know, after 5 pm. You know Eastern time, or on the weekend Saturday, Sunday like, why did they close the market? So what if there’s another Cuban missile crisis. It makes no sense right?
    And also the reason why it’s so volatile is that it’s actually the most
    desirable commodity on the planet. And there’s all these people with these weird Bloomberg machine terminals, whatever they are, always pegging everything to the Bitcoin. So a lot of people ask about ethereum dogecoin webs, right. I think Bitcoin is the only true.
    Everything else is the false prophets. Everything else is the false coins. The immaculate conception of Bitcoin and Satoshi.
    I think this is actually a big deal, because anything that is not Bitcoin, you know, ethereum and the like. They they need some sort of spokesperson, or, you know, individual to prop up the value right, whereas Satoshi, he invented it, he disappeared forever. Now the reason why this is such a big deal is that
    every other crypto thing which is not Bitcoin.
    It does not have a hard cap
    like you could print more ethereums. You could print more. Whatever tokens you cannot print more bitcoins, and that’s that’s the big thought.
    So. Volatility is vitality. Eric Kim. I actually didn’t say that. Sorry. That was actually Michael Saylor. I typed that in wrong. But essentially
    you know, volatility is vitality, and the more volatile the more energy the power you have, the more vitality you have. So once again, people think of volatility as being risk. That is actually not the case. Bitcoin is going to go up forever, but it’s going to be like an extreme roller coaster and go up down, but with extreme swings it’s extreme performance. So
    yeah, volatility is not risk. Volatility is just going up and down a lot, but essentially over a long enough time span. It’s going to go up forever.
    So I borrowed a lot of slides quite liberally from Michael Saylor. Some of these are from his recent Microsoft. Pitch. And yeah, just go. michael.com go to his presentations looking at yourself. So I’ll just make some quick points. So
    essentially, currently, Bitcoin is like a 2 trillion dollar asset class right? And this is also from Jesse Myers once in a species.com. And the reason why this is important is currently you know. Let us say the whole world’s economy is 900 trillion dollars, right? And
    what we have our eyes on is real estate. So real estate is, you know, most people don’t really just use real estate as a place to live right? Otherwise, you just rent. People use it for a long term store of value. So, for example, if you’re a really really rich family from New York City, you own, like 10 square blocks in Manhattan, and, you know, does your descendants sell, you know.
    a square block to buy himself a few Ferraris. No, that that would be a bad strategy. So the the tip I have for any single person trying to build intergenerational wealth. Keep it simple. Only one rule. You don’t sell the Bitcoin. If you face extreme poverty or financial distress, I don’t know. Become an Uber driver or something. Pay the bills, but don’t sell the Bitcoin.
    and currently I think we’re going to see is Bitcoin is just going to take over the gold market, which is 16 trillion dollars, maybe the cars and collectible art market.
    Now, a big thought is this is from Michael Saylor once again, is that
    all these assets on the planet.
    Some of half of it is to provide utility. Right? So, for example, you know.
    let’s say you need you need somewhere to live right? No so that provides utility right? But then, again, some of it is to preserve capital right? And
    as a 36 year old millennial nowadays. The pressures. Oh, you got to buy a single family home today, right? But the the reason I get so sus of people saying you should buy a house is that they’re like, oh, you essentially need somewhere to live. You’ll build capital. Blah! Blah, right? You don’t want to give money to land, but it’s like no, you only need one reason like you would only ever buy a single family house. If let’s say you really like having a backyard and a garage, or what is right. But it’s really not
    a money making thing, because homeownership is like a trillion, times more expensive than you would otherwise think, and as a consequence, with a single family home, even if the price is going up right
    at best, you might be breaking, even if not, you know, slowly bleeding yourself. Because, let’s say, real estate is on average, going up 10% a year, right? The money supply the inflationary. M 2 supply is 15% a year. So you’re actually kind of losing money.
    So the big thought is once again, you know.
    the optimistic thought is eventually all these long term sort of things are going to become digital capital. I still think about this, the Warren Buffett. They’re all gonna die. And then, when we, you know, take the take the mantle. What’s gonna happen the next 20 years, even if you’re 80 years old right now? 81 years old. Shout out.
    You know, I think I’m optimistic. We could live to be 100 20. So yeah, this is definitely the next wave. You’re not going to want to miss right? And you know, currently a lot of millennials. People like everyone wants to buy the Lambo or the Ferrari.
    You’re you’re going to lose the value of it in about 3 years. You want to live forever.
    So these are some kind of conservative growth estimates, according to Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin 24 model. So in about 21 years, and this was still pretty conservative. Right? Bitcoin is going to become a 280 trillion dollar, you know thing right? So going from 2 trillion to 200 trillion, so at least 10 x. So you’re conservatively, you’re going to see your money at least 10 x in 21 years, which is pretty cool. Right? It’s not going to take over all these other things. It might, but it might not.
    Now people always ask.
    what is Bitcoin backed by? So I did the maths right and based on what other people say, too essentially the Bitcoin network. If you took all the apple Amazon aws servers, Meta.
    combine them all times 20, you could still not hack the Bitcoin network in in terms of the raw power that goes into powering. Think about like 20 nuclear power reactors powering the thing right? And also people don’t understand is there’s already been 850 billion dollars of quote, real money investment thing follow Blackrock. They just recently recommended most of their
    you know, owners to allocate at least 2% of their portfolio into Bitcoin, which is kind of a big deal. Look about what Larry Fink says. Blackrock is like what they own. What 40 trillion dollars of assets around the planet. They’re they’re kind of a big deal. And also it’s a network effect. So you remember, in the early days of Facebook. It was only it was only university students with the Edu address were allowed to join in. Then they opened up to everybody, and the network effect of Facebook is that
    if you have Facebook and I have Facebook, then Facebook instantly becomes more valuable to both of us, because I can now share my photos with you, whatever’s right. But then, if your friends friends also have Facebook, it becomes much more valuable to everything. Same thing goes with facetime right. The reason why I got you know I used to be a Diehard android dude. Now I’m like all icloud everything. It makes life so much easier. You get your mom an iphone. Now you get facetime imessage. It makes life way better.
    And so Bitcoin is going to be the same thing as more and more people are going to continue to download Coinbase or Whatevs. And also my optimistic thought is, if Apple doesn’t want to become irrelevant, it’s I’m very certain the next 5 to 10 years. Apple is going to have their own
    Bitcoin storage thing in your icloud account. It makes sense right. They have apple pay. They have the apple wallet. Essentially.
    apple is the new bank. And so now, when they do like a you know, a 3 device authentication for your bitcoins through your iphone, your ipad and your macbook pro whatevers.
    It’s actually it might actually be one of the most safe ways to store your bitcoins.
    Also things to think about. If you’re a traditional investor
    so there’s this notion called the cost to capital cost to capital that Michael Saylor says a lot. I might be getting this wrong. But
    essentially the S. And P. 500 right?
    on average, is like 14 to 15% return year over year. Right? So if you’re not making at least 15% or over 15% a year, you’re essentially losing your bleeding money. So real estate gold bonds is kind of a losing bet, right? And so the magnificent 7 which all the big tech stocks 28%, a little bit better, right? But look at Bitcoin. It’s like 62% year over year. And it’s kind of the obvious bet, right?
    And even if you think about you know, everyone’s talking about Nvidia Tesla. You know what is right.
    I think the reason why the mainstream media they don’t like to talk about micro strategy is that it’s still a little bit too weird and bizarre. And it’s not as buzzworthy as AI, because, okay, people like to think of this like evil Terminator AI, the video going to take over the world and find it right. But nobody is like Bitcoin, like
    Bitcoin is not an android walking around 2 feet, taking over the planet right? So people actually don’t like to talk about Bitcoin. And for so long people thought that Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme right. No one ever thought that AI was a Ponzi scheme. So the video always catches the headlines. But look at microstrates, look at the best performing stock on the human unit in the human universe
    over 3 x. That of Nvidia, which is already impressive, and Nvidia is already destroying Tesla by a massive margin as well. Right? So
    I mean? That’s that’s pretty obvious, right?
    Even Donald Trump watches a Nashville presentation. He quotes Michael Saylor directly, says, Never sell your Bitcoin. Apparently Eric Trump, the son of Donald Trump has known Michael Saylor for 20 years. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but if that’s the case.
    I’m like a hundred percent certain that. You know, Michael Saylor essentially has the left ear of Donald Trump.
    And yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a very good thing.
    So if you want to plug and create your own models. Google, the Bitcoin, 24 model. It’s on Github
    plug in your own assumptions.
    And this is the big thing that I have my eyes set on. So currently, you know, it’s December right? And everyone’s waiting for the trump to get into the office January 20.th So this is a tricky thing. So I used to be Super Anti Donald Trump, right? Because I could care less about politics and stuff like that right? And
    but
    one Donald Trump became super super pro bitcoin. I started to listen and start watching all his interviews and looking like honestly the you know, I’m from the Bay Area like Liberal Democrat, my whole life right? And actually, I kind of realized, wow, the the left leaning media is kind of the they’re kind of the evil ones here. And Donald Trump, he seems actually kind of like a cool, nice nice nice guy, right?
    And the big thought is.
    there’s no, there’s not going to be a World war 3. What is right? And Bitcoin, under the trump administration is gonna explode, and it’s gonna be the
    the greatest 4 years of prosperity of all time, and this once again coming from like a super left leaning liberal. So this is a good thought so. Anyways. Let us say, you know.
    America leads the charge in the crypto Bitcoin revolution. Right? And yeah, I think
    assuming that America really wants to control the future. I think the America purchasing 6 million bitcoins is not fully out of this this planet. Right?
    So some thoughts on building personal family wealth.
    So the reason why I think this is kind of a big deal is that
    everyone wants to build wealth right. Everyone wants to be intelligent with their investing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nonprofit, a charity, a church, Mother Teresa, like every single organization, will always need money. Capital. If you have an endowment, you know, for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford Brown University. Whatever even the Uc. Is right, everyone needs money and capital right.
    and I don’t like to think too much about the macro, because I’m not an institutional investor. I just think about myself, my family, my best friends, my squad. Right? So the goal is building personal family wealth and how to intelligently invest. So a lot of people talk about timings. Oh, when should I buy Bitcoin? Should I time it the high. Then people take out these charts and these candlesticks, which is all just witchcraft and pseudoscience don’t follow any of that.
    Essentially the thought is.
    anytime is a good time to buy Bitcoin if it’s high, low, Middle, whatever. We’re going to keep buying the top forever. So recently I bought some more Bitcoin at $100,000. Right then it dipped down to 90,000 to 88,000 hit 103,000 again, and so I’m pretty sure that in 1020 years I’m going to be buying Bitcoin at 1 million, a Bitcoin, 10 million dollars a Bitcoin, 55 million dollars a Bitcoin, whatever is right, and because if you do the simple math, just think at least 4 years ahead, right? So if I could tell you with 100 certainty that Bitcoin is going to be 1.2 million a Bitcoin
    in 4 years
    as long as you’re buying it for less than a million dollars a coin. You’re going to be in the green like it’s it’s kind of a a good bet, right? And actually, also, ironically, my personal thought is
    chasing gains is a good thing, but also it’s it’s a good idea to not get quote greedy in the sense of maximizing your gains. So so, for example, right like, what’s the difference between getting a 38% yield and a 32% yield like the the difference is nominal. Don’t don’t worry so much about maximization, because even a lot of what I thought my trades were bad
    2 years ago ended up being right. So as investors, we have to think at least 410-20-3040 years ahead of us. So don’t worry so much about the the short term
    so practical and pragmatic investing strategies right? So once again, so if I had a simple blueprint, so
    some some simple thoughts.
    there’s lots of different blends. You could do this, you could. You could be super simple. Just 100 to Bitcoin, buy it on Coinbase what is right, and just keep stacking forever.
    100 legitimate. That’s the Bitcoin Maximus opposed the triple, triple Maxi, the triple Maximalist approach. If you just need to pay the bills whatever, and still stack the Bitcoins. My personal suggestion is put 80% of your wealth into Bitcoin and 20% of your wealth into micro strategy Mstr stock. And once again. This is this is what you do. So let’s say, for simplicity of math. Let’s say
    Let’s say you have a million dollars or a hundred $1,000, or you use whatever kind of a number you want, right? So put 20% that to microstrategy stock whenever it goes up
    beyond the principal, sell some of that stock and put that into micro strategies. Sorry. Put that into Bitcoin, and or use that money to just pay your your bills. So once again what I personally did right?
    $150,000 working capital into micro strategy Mstr stock. And let’s say, when it goes from worth $150,000 to $160,000. I’ll sell $10,000 worth that stock. That $10,000 gets deposited to my checking account, which is linked to my coinbase. Then I’ll just buy $10,000 worth of bitcoin right? Or, if you need that, $10,000
    for living expenses. Let’s say
    you need $3,000 to pay your rent. You take $3,000 of that to pay your rent, and you put the other 7% of that into Bitcoin.
    also some other definition. What’s the difference between being an investor, a trader versus speculator?
    So an investor, we want to be investors. We want to think about (102) 030-4050 years ahead of us. A trader is a bunch of these, like 20 year old. High testosterone degenerates, you know, single, you know, maybe addicted drugs, or whatever right, who just want to like look cool. I made a billion dollars in a month by using all these complicated
    statistical models. Blah! Blah! Right? But you don’t. You don’t want to be a trader because essentially it’s
    nobody could time the market. Not even God could time the market right. And what a speculator is people who invest in meme coins. So a meme coin is like buying a Dogecoin or shiba Inu, that the reason why these are not you should not do this is that it is extremely dangerous. You’re going to lose all your money, and it requires
    a charismatic leader to support it. So Dogecoin, right? Dogecoin is essentially elon musk coin right?
    But if one day Elon musk tweets. Ha! Ha! Doge was just a joke all along, right. It’s not worth anything. The value of it will pump it to 0, or if once again. Elon dies in a you know a robo taxi accident. The value of dogecoin is going to go to 0, whereas if Elon Musk dies, you know Bitcoin is going to still keep going up forever. So speculator is meme coins beyond bitcoin us Bitcoiners. We’re we’re investors.
    So you know, somebody also asked about, you know, monetary inflation right? So there’s this thing called the M. 2 monetary supply of the the rate rate inflation.
    And once again you’re going to have to exceed at least 13% to 15% to
    not lose money. So, for example, let us say, you have a billion dollars of us dollars in your checking account. Right? You’re going to be bled to death. Right? So in a year, your 1 billion dollar is going to shrink to 750 million down to 500 million, to 350 million. And essentially, you’re going to get a point where your money is worthless.
    And already we see this right now. So currently, the price of real estate, single family homes is exploding. But this is my critical view. How much of that is that the value of a single family house is higher versus our Us. Dollars are just simply worthless. Right? So if you just do the same simple maths, right?
    So let us say that. You know, minimum wage goes from $15 an hour to $20 an hour overnight for Mcdonald’s worker. Right? That means instantly. You see, 25% inflation. So your 1 million dollars in the bank is now worth only 750
    $1,000. So yeah, once again. The real real rich people. They store less than 1% of their wealth in
    Us. Dollars in their checking account like, you’re not gonna have Jeff Bezos bragging to other people that he has 10 billion dollars of us dollars in their checking account. No, it’s it’s all going to be in you know, stocks, or, you know, real estate. And actually, ideally, Bitcoin. Cyber cyber capital.
    So yeah, that’s that’s essentially the the end of my presentation.

  • Introduction to Bitcoin

    FULL PRESENTATION VIDEO RECORDING DROPBOX

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    Slides


    Introduction to Bitcoin Transcript

    Eric Kim: All right, we’ll get the party starting all right.
    Eric Kim: Hopefully, everything is hearing.
    Eric Kim: and yeah, thanks for tuning. All right, we’re gonna start all right.
    Eric Kim: So the Bitcoin revolution, the revolution will be televised. Eric, him right? So, starting off.
    Eric Kim: you know, what is Bitcoin? Why does it matter?
    Eric Kim: So I think the 1st important critical thing is trying to consider and think you know what is Bitcoin we’ve all heard about in the news we heard about Bitcoin as being a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. And honestly, my mom has gone through her fair share of Ponzi schemes like she she got suckered by the whole Amway scam.
    Eric Kim: and I think the reason why Bitcoin is so important and critical is, I essentially see at this point. Bitcoin is like the early days of the Internet. So if you go into a time machine and you could tell somebody in the past, okay, you know, in the days before email existed. Right? So okay, once one day, you know, everyone’s gonna have a supercomputer in their pocket. They’re using it to check all their bank statements. You’re going to be able to use your camera on your phone to scan your you know your checks, your
    Eric Kim: your bank account balances. You can use this to send money and messages and videos to everyone on the planet. Instantly everyone would have thought you were crazy.
    Eric Kim: and I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin. So I think also construct a way to start thinking about. Bitcoin is trying to figure out what Bitcoin is. Not. So my personal opinion is, I do not think that Bitcoin is actually cryptocurrency. I think currency is the Us. Dollar, and I think one of the biggest problems about the whole field of crypto and cryptocurrency is.
    Eric Kim: everyone is like a crypto anarchist, which means that they want to see the Us. Government and all the governments on the planet fail, and they can essentially live in peace and silent without interference from the Government. Yet, you know, obviously, at the end of the day, it’s nice to have public streets. It’s nice to not get robbed in the streets. And actually, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin is.
    Eric Kim: People think that Bitcoin is trying to replace the Us. Dollar. But my personal thought is, Bitcoin is going to be a supplement to the Us. Dollar. Essentially, I thought this a long time ago that essentially Bitcoin is digital gold to hedge against inflation, which means, as our money, our Us. Dollars, or our euros, or our local currencies become devalued.
    Eric Kim: The upside is, our Bitcoin will become more valuable. I think the best analogy that I got was from chairman of microstrategy mstr Michael saylor, essentially thinking that Bitcoin is is not digital currency, but digital
    Eric Kim: real estate.
    Eric Kim: So I think this analogy is better, because nobody’s on. You know their zillow, you know, 20 times a day, checking their home prices right? And this is my mad. Max Post. Apocalyptic perspective. Is that okay? So imagine the future where there’s, you know, essentially.
    Eric Kim: there’s this like nuclear fallout. And you know.
    Eric Kim: there’s no inhabitable places anywhere. And let us say, there’s only 21 million single family homes left on the planet for anybody to live. Obviously, sooner or later, you know, people are going to want somewhere to live. And so I think the best analogy, I think, is Bitcoin as digital real estate, which means that with digital real estate.
    Eric Kim: You know, a lot of people like, yeah, you know, I want to quickly make money off of Bitcoin. But how do I make money off of it? It’s kind of like the early days of real estate. So if you bought Manhattan in the 16 hundreds, you know, how do you monetize it? And I still think that we’re in the very, very early days of bitcoin and institutional adoption, which means you’re going to start to see New Bitcoin products come out. So some simple thoughts. So we’ve all heard stories of Scumbag
    Eric Kim: San Francisco based
    Eric Kim: scumbag landlords, you know, charging an arm and a leg for their tenants, and we all hit the landlords, I think with Bitcoin we’ll become the new digital landlords, which means
    Eric Kim: effectively,
    Eric Kim: we will in the future be able to like rent out our Bitcoin. And you know, let’s say
    Eric Kim: Let’s say we have one bitcoin right, and it’s and then I think that the personal math I like to do in my head is thinking that one Bitcoin is equivalent to one single family home. So I currently live in Los Angeles, in Culver City. It’s kind of insane. A single family home. I’ve even seen some in my neighborhood for 4.4 million dollars. The average Median household single family home is around 1.7 million dollars.
    Eric Kim: So in my personal mind, where I think Bitcoin is a trillion times more valuable than physical real estate land, because you could always make more of it. It’s not a real scarcity.
    Eric Kim: What that then means is.
    Eric Kim: I think, my mind the price of a single family home, and the price of a Bitcoin should be piped to another. So in my mind I still think of a Bitcoin at least 1.1
    Eric Kim: 1.7 2.1, maybe even 4.4 million dollars a coin. And I think this is a very
    Eric Kim: It’s a very fascinating idea, because also, you know, people say, Oh, but Bitcoin is not real. Money is yeah, but like our dead, shiny rocks. Aka. Gold money either, or is fiat currency, you know pieces of paper. You can eat pieces of paper to to live. And I think one of the most interesting things I learned about the philosophy of money is that
    Eric Kim: essentially all money is just existing the value of men, and it is all essentially subjective. Now, what makes Bitcoin so fascinating to me is that it’s the 1st time in human existence.
    Eric Kim: All 100 trillion years we’ve been existing. Whatever is that? You had a hard cap supply of money. So, for example.
    Eric Kim: people often talk about gold, right? So the issue with gold is at the time it was the least bad form of money, because it was very, very scarce. It was difficult to find. It’s difficult to mine transport. Yet there was lots of good properties of gold. It’s, you know, essentially it kind of lasts forever. Aesthetically, it looks beautiful, the nice yellow color of gold mimics that of the sun, and you know, at least back in the day, let’s say you had gold coins it could easily fit in your front pocket whatevers.
    Eric Kim: But now things become a lot more difficult because we’re living in the 21st century, the 20 second century on young, you know, we would have flying car drone robo taxi, self driving car waymos. It’s like, Why are we still using an antiquated digital framework of modern day banking swift code accounts. If you’ve ever tried to send money,
    Eric Kim: you know, from the Netherlands to South Korea, to Nigeria, to Lagos whatever you find that the the whole swift system is kind of like a bunch of gangster mafiosas like even my mom is currently living in South Korea. And if I would just need to send her like any sort of small amount of monies, right? It’s like crazy. It’s like, why does it. Take 3 or 4 days. Cost like me, 55 bucks, and it’s like this should be done instantly. So I think it’s a big big big revolution.
    Eric Kim: So why does Bitcoin matter? It’s kind of like asking somebody why does clean water matter so
    Eric Kim: one of the things I love about Michael Saylor, and I highly recommend watching all of his videos. Sailor. It’s essentially Twitter or X at Sailor or michael.com.
    Eric Kim: and he uses this analogy of sewer water. So let us say, every all 8 billion people on the planet are all drinking sewer water, and people are dying of dysentery, and people are saying, I don’t get it, you know I exercise, you know. I
    Eric Kim: you know I eat healthy exercise every day, but I’m still dying of dysentery. My kids are dying of dysentery, and so the whole issue is that if you’re drinking sewer water, no matter how healthy your lifestyle is, how virtuous you is. It don’t matter. You’re going to be, you know, dying of dysentery, or perpetually sick.
    Eric Kim: And so, if we think about these physiological terms, and apply it to Bitcoin and money and digital capital. This becomes really fascinating because my personal thought and you know, also, I grew up in a family of poverty, poverty, meaning that I thought I was going to be homeless at least 2 or 3 times.
    Eric Kim: Dad perpetually addicted to gambling with away the rent monies, and so the whole the whole ethos. I had a kid ever since I was 15. Okay, I’m going to take every single penny. I can immediately go out buying some new sneakers, you know, buy some cool clothes, and I literally had $0 in my bank account.
    Eric Kim: and so I think the pernicious, vicious cycle of inflation is.
    Eric Kim: you cannot blame people for not saving up capital for their future if the money itself is deflating at such a rapid pace, and so I personally think that you know Bitcoin is like giving every single person on the planet like unlimited free Fiji water, or the best alkaline hipster. Whatever water you want. Essentially giving people clean water. And
    Eric Kim: a lot of people say, Yeah, but Bitcoin is not real money. It’s a okay. So I think this is a big this is a big shift for me also, personally.
    Eric Kim: my personal thought is, Bitcoin is actually more important than
    Eric Kim: like, okay, so my personal thought. This is all just my personal thoughts right?
    Eric Kim: So we should not think about money. We should think about capital. I think capital is a lot more
    Eric Kim: robust and strong as a concept. So, for example, capital comes from Cap CAP. Like upon your head. K-ap. Essentially it came from the head of oxen. So if you read the Iliad, the Odyssey essentially, every time you want to appease the gods, you have to sacrifice a hectacomb, Hecta means 100 a hundred head of oxen to appease the gods.
    Eric Kim: And you know, obviously, that’s very expensive, like, can you imagine, if you know you sacrificed a hundred Lamborghinis to appease the gods, it would be quite expensive endeavor. Right?
    Eric Kim: And so, capital. We all live under. Capitalism doesn’t matter. If you’re living in Europe, Africa, Asia, America, China, and also one thing that people don’t understand is, I think, what a lot of these people, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, China is going to take over. China’s not going to take over. It’s like China is dependent on America, and effectively, the Chinese Yuan. The cny is essentially effectively pegged to the Us. Dollar and the Us. Is essentially the world. Reserve currency
    Eric Kim: and
    Eric Kim: capital is what we seek, not money. Money, you know. Use money, like, you know. I’ll get into this little detail a little bit further. But talking about currency, so currency is like, you know, buying a Starbucks Frappuccino, or buying a in and out Burger. Right? That’s like money currency, right?
    Eric Kim: Capital is essentially long storm, long term, store of value. So it’s building generational wealth. So one of my favorite songs from Kanye West is the off the grid songs that we off the grid grid grid this for my kid, kids, for when my kids, kids have kids.
    Eric Kim: And I think this is also the big thing is a lot of millennials. Nowadays.
    Eric Kim: I think the disincentive to have kids is
    Eric Kim: people. You know, there’s so much fear mongering about the the future is gonna become, you know.
    Eric Kim: boil the seas or whatever. So there’s not going to be a future. So essentially, there’s a strong sense of pessimism. But Bitcoin, to me is like solidified optimism, which means that the future is going to be glorious and great. And you know, even having Seneca right now, think about his future kids, kids, kids, or my future kids, kids, kids.
    Eric Kim: It brings me so much joy. Because the simple strategy, you just keep stacking Bitcoin until you die, and then you hand it on to your kids. Your kids give it to their kids kids. It’s like, if you owned, you know, a hundred penthouses or 10 square blocks or 20 square blocks in Manhattan, on the main island. Do you ever sell that to buy a Lamborghini? No, you! That’s
    Eric Kim: that’s not what one does, or liquefy it all into us dollars and brag about. How many billions of dollars you have in your bank account. Nope, that’s not the goal
    Eric Kim: you want to build capital. And traditionally it’s been real estate. But once again, real estate was a good idea. In the 16 hundreds, 17 hundreds, 18 hundreds, 19 hundreds, 22 thousands. The subprime mortgage meltdown proved that, you know. Maybe it’s not always the best idea. And I think the hard thing is, people say, Yeah, but you know, real estate, you know, essentially, everyone needs somewhere to live, and it’s a
    Eric Kim: historically, the value of real estate is always going to go up forever. Now people say that the tricky thing is the pace of monetary inflation is around 15%. The best thing is to either chat Gpt or Google. The M. 2 money supplies. And essentially what you will find is
    Eric Kim: them to money supply is essentially a metric in which the Us. Government, or any other government on the planet, includes the euro and stuff. They keep printing more currency. And the reason why then this becomes an issue is that you have more currency in the system that means the individual value of each unit is going to go down. And actually the thing that I call this the in and out Burger. Not in and out, Burger the
    Eric Kim: the shake Shack Burger incident. So me and Seneca we used to always buy a single burger, Patty, for a dollar 51 day we pop up. They say it’s 2 50, a burger. Patty, we’re like, we. What this makes no sense is like, yeah, we just increased the minimum wage to $20 an hour increase our wage. $20 an hour for fast food, and the hard thing is with
    Eric Kim: minimum wage. You cannot rewind the
    Eric Kim: the the hands of time. If you suddenly said that the minimum wage is only $70 an hour, there will be rights. The streets would not be not be good.
    Eric Kim: so we’re all photographers, you know, street photographers, whatever. And the hard thing with digital is in our minds, digital is infinite and free. So, for example, I could take a copy of Mozart’s 5th Symphony, or whatever, as Mp. 3, file, and I could copy and distribute it a trillion times with 0 marginal costing right? And so this is where the notion of cyber becomes more interesting. And I’ll think about like, you know, cyber punk thinking about cyber truck.
    Eric Kim: It’s
    Eric Kim: essentially once again, mathematically, cryptographically, that the hard science and the hard math is there can never be more than 1. 21 million coins
    Eric Kim: in existence come up forever. Even if you took all the quantum ultra computers on the planet, times it by 20, you still could not produce more bitcoins. It’s just not how it works right?
    Eric Kim: And so
    Eric Kim: I think there’s different ways. You can think about it right? So you could think about like I also could. Another fun analogy I think about is that let’s say one Bitcoin is like one cyberox, and it’s immortable, immortal, indestructible. It’ll give you life forever right. And there’s only gonna be 21 million of them in the futures. And now and so this is your chance to get one for an extreme discount. Even if I could tell you right. So once again, the single family home analogy, let’s say.
    Eric Kim: let’s even say let’s say you want to buy a single family home. Let’s say it costs a million euros or whatever. Right? So if I could tell you today that you could buy a single family home for only a hundred $1,000 or a hundred €1,000 you’d be like, Wow, that’s that’s the deal of a century. That’s you’re still getting a 90% discount. And my personal thought is.
    Eric Kim: Bitcoin is far more valuable than digital real estate, because in the next 2030 years, when essentially all the all the baby boomers. The Gen. Xers die off, and it’s the millennials and Gen. Z’s. And, alphas! That take over everyone’s going to not really care about physical real estate no more. It’ll be digital cyber real estate, which is Bitcoin.
    Eric Kim: So my personal story, how did I get into Bitcoin? So it might seem a little bit random. It’s like, Okay, Eric, you’re super famous for photography, street photography like, how do you get to Bitcoin like? It’s like, so random, right? But actually, it’s not very random at all, because, you know, if you’ve been following me carefully, you know the whole time, I’ve always been talking about living minimalistically, frugally, Spartan lifestyle, whatever’s. And you know now that you know I’m pretty stacked with a bitcoin and microstrategy stock mstr.
    Eric Kim: Funny enough, I’ve personally found that my lifestyle habits haven’t changed much, I mean, I’m a little bit more generous, maybe, like, you know, took out a friend last night to all you eat cream, barbecued
    Eric Kim: paid for her bill didn’t really even flinch. And so my personal thought with Bitcoin is, I personally wanted monetary freedom, and so long story short, so I’ll never forget this moment. So I’m born 1988. Went to Uc. As undergrad my roommate at the time, Kevin. It’s our junior here’s on Reddit, and I’ll never forget we’re in our studio apartment. I think I was distracted. I was doing something else. He was like Eric, you know. He’s on some subreddit, and he’s like.
    Eric Kim: Oh, Eric, this thing called Bitcoin, and you just bought a bitcoin like I bought 2 domino’s pizzas for like 10,000 bitcoins. We should just get like a hundred bucks worth of it, and just see what happened. I’m like, sounds like a scam and disregarded it, and I did the math. Now, if me and Kevin and my roommate Kevin, just bought a hundred bitcoins at the time
    Eric Kim: for funsies, right? And I had a hundred bucks right? We would each be worth at least 1.2 billion dollars. Today, I’m like, man. This was like the worst mistake of my life, right? But everything has happened as it should have happened. You know. Maybe if I had become a billionaire I’d just become some degenerate, you know. Cocaine addict on some beach somewhere in in Hawaii, and then Seneca would never been born. I would have never done my photography, world travels, whatevers, and my then next reintroduction to Bitcoin was
    Eric Kim: kind of more recently when moving to La. The cost of living is so expensive, and you know every I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want financial freedom. A long story short, I 1st heard about Bitcoin again, kind of earlier than when I was living in Vietnam around 2017, 2018,
    Eric Kim: and at the time I didn’t really need Bitcoin, because our living expenses were so cheap. It was 320 bucks a month for a brand new studio apartment, fully furnished up, lighting in the jazz right? And even at the time, passively, the income we’re making. Let’s say it’s a thousand $2,000 a month. Let’s say it’s not even that much right, but like our whole total expenses, living expenses like maybe 6 700 bucks a month, so I had the epiphany I’m like, I’m never going to run out of money. So already, at the age of 26 in my mind, I mentally retired right
    Eric Kim: and just more for funsies. I met this guy named Bing in in Singapore. Heard about this thing called Digibyte. Dgb, I don’t even think they’re around anymore. But at the time I’m like, Okay, I want to buy some bitcoins, buy some digibyte. How do I do this? And at the time Coinbase seemed like the best option, because it was the simplest, most minimalist to me it looked like the paypal for for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I’m either school bought about $25,000 worth of bitcoin, which, and Bitcoin was only about
    Eric Kim: $7,000, $6,999 a bitcoin. So 7 k, so I bought about what? 3 and a half bitcoins at the time. For $25,000. Put some of that into digibyte, held a bitcoin or 2, and essentially saw the waves and the crashes and the doge coins and stuff like that. And essentially, I just kind of woke up to my guts and found out that Bitcoin was a real deal.
    Eric Kim: I think I think you know. Also, some strange analogies is to me Bitcoin is almost like a new
    Eric Kim: World economic religion, I mean, people who follow Bitcoin are like fanatic. They’re zealous about it. They follow Michael Saylor like his.
    Eric Kim: you know the profit. You know the next profit of Bitcoin right? And it’s always good to invest in religions right to invest in religions, to invest in cults like the cult of Tesla, Elon, musk apple, Steve Jobs. Whatevs, right?
    Eric Kim: So essentially and then, more. Now, like, you know. Obviously, I have financial independence now, and the only reason I’m teaching this workshop or sharing this information is, I almost feel like it’s my ethical imperative like. Once again, if you could have discovered Internet in the early days, or clean drinking water, I would feel that it would almost be a disservice if I did not share this information with others.
    Eric Kim: So everyone’s always about like, okay, so what is the Bitcoin gonna be worth? So there’s the open source model. Michael Saylor, I think, helped create it. It’s called the Bitcoin 21 model, I think. Right?
    Eric Kim: So 21 years from now his base case is that Bitcoin is going to be 13 million of Bitcoin bear case, 3 million a Bitcoin. The bull case is 49 million a Bitcoin, and no, this was in 2024 in July before Trump was announced as President, and he is ultra super pro crypto and bitcoin and also worth
    Eric Kim: following, is his son Eric Trump, ironically. His name is also Eric also the funny thing. There’s a bunch of Eric’s actually in the world of Bitcoin, Eric Kim Eric Semler, a similar scientific, this other Etf guy who works for Bloomberg. His name is Eric Balconus, or something like that. And Eric Trump.
    Eric Kim: And
    Eric Kim: essentially, we have an all Republican trump, pro bitcoin pro crypto, President and Cabinet, whatever right? And so these were all written by Michael Saylor’s predictions before we had the most pro bitcoin
    Eric Kim: government of all time. So all these numbers, I think, should be inflated. So my personal thought is, I think, for the next 4 years. Once Trump takes office, January 20, th 2025. I think this will be the craziest, best Bitcoin Bull Run of all time the next 4 years. So currently, Bitcoin’s been going up around 60% to 62% arr annual rate of return. And I think
    Eric Kim: once Trump takes office, and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna buy the 1 million Bitcoins, or whatever for the strategic American Reserve.
    Eric Kim: And also I think Eric Trump, his son, is committed to having Bitcoin be at least a million in Bitcoin.
    Eric Kim: So let’s see. So my personal prediction, right? So I think Bitcoin will grow by at least 120% arr over the next 4 years. So let’s say, Bitcoin is worth around $100,000 right now. So by next year, let’s say it’s 250,000 the year after that, let’s say it’s 750,000, let’s say the year after that it’s like 1.2 million. So I think we’re on track to hit a million a bitcoin in 4 years about 10 x gain. So just do the mass from then.
    Eric Kim: Now, people are always asking, okay, this, you know, Bitcoin reserve strategy, you know, like, how is? And why is America going to buy the Bitcoins? Right? So we’re essentially out of physical land and real estate. Now we have to go to cyberspace right?
    Eric Kim: And it seems kind of silly, like something out of a sci-fi film. But the truth is, they’re currently the war we’re having with China and Russia. It’s it’s not physical war per se. It’s actually cyber war. So cyber security is the big big money maker. Even cyber penetration testing. Right? I think Gmail is trying to get like all these malicious actors tried to attack the Gmail servers like a million times a minute. Something crazy, right?
    Eric Kim: And if you look at the history of America, right? So, Manhattan, 1926, the price of Manhattan. It was essentially stolen from the natives. Right? 60 guilders, right Louisiana purchase, you know, to fund Napoleon, California. Also kind of stolen from the the local Mexicans right? And also Alaska right. The the payoff was great, right, and so essentially the Bitcoin Act, the Cynthia Lummis Bill.
    Eric Kim: She’s trying to get the States to buy at least a million bitcoins right? And you know even a Michael Saylor is much more aggressive. He’s like no America should at least purchase maybe 5 or 6 million bitcoins, which is 20 to 25% of the whole Bitcoin supply. And all America has to do. It’s a free trade. They just need to sell their gold and then buy Bitcoin. And in a recent interview that I was listening from Saylor.
    Eric Kim: super fascinating, is like
    Eric Kim: essentially what he said was the super evil genius strategy of selling America, selling her gold reserves and buying Bitcoin is that if that’s the case, comma.
    Eric Kim: we demonetize our enemies.
    Eric Kim: you know, capital reserves. So then suddenly, the the gold of the Russians, the Chinese, will go to 0, and then everyone’s going to rush into Bitcoin. And if America owns Bitcoin, it’s a good sign for the future. And also another big thing I want to talk about. Why does America have the best economy on the planet.
    Eric Kim: So we essentially gave birth to Apple Amazon, Facebook, the magnificent 7 stocks, Netflix. And you know, people talk about China. It’s like. Okay, I don’t know a single rich mainland Chinese oligarch who doesn’t want to send their kids to the States to
    Eric Kim: to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, you know, buy a nice house in Palo Alto, the Bay area, or even Vancouver. No rich mainland Chinese person actually wants to be in China, but because of capital controls, they’re kind of stuck. So once there’s going to be a mad rush to Bitcoin. That means that you, your family, your whole squad, is going to prosper now.
    Eric Kim: you know, issues. My, my friend Dante had a question about storage. So
    Eric Kim: I think the hard thing with storage is okay. So how do you say this?
    Eric Kim: I, my, this is my personal philosophy. The reason I do not personally trust cold storage for myself or more of these self custody options is that
    Eric Kim: I know that I am very forgetful, and my biggest fear is, let’s say, I forget my passcode, or whatever is right to the Bitcoins. And or let’s say, my kids, kids can forget it right? Then boom like, you’re gonna be out like a hundred 1 million dollars. Right? So that’s that’s not fun, right? And so personally, I think the easiest is to just, you know, store it on the cloud. So, using a trusted custodian, whether it be coinbase. I think fidelity has their own services now.
    Eric Kim: And the you know honestly, it seems like Coinbase is probably the best option coinbase.com, or you just download your iphone ipad. Whatever right is that you could also get a link with your biometric apple id data, whether it be face id or thumbprint. Whatevs right? So this way, it just feels much more secure. So
    Eric Kim: for me, I would prefer an 80 to 85% optimal thing that is kind of dummy proof rather than take the 100 secure option which, because of user error, I might fail, and something that I personally learned is
    Eric Kim: in terms of technology. And all these things in between
    Eric Kim: seeking the simplest, most straightforward option
    Eric Kim: that is least complicated is often the best solution. And the reason I would be very, very wary of a lot of these people promoting, you know, buying their hardware wallets. Whatever’s right, everyone has a buck to make. Everyone has a bitcoin to make. Everyone wants to make a few satoshis here and there.
    Eric Kim: and so they’re trying to fear monger use. Oh, you’re gonna you know, Coinbase going to get hacked. And I’m like, no, I don’t think it is. It’s like, you know, back. It’s like essentially a Us. Government, you know, it’s essentially it’s traded on the the You know the Stock Exchange. It’s a American based company. I would. I would not trust anything outside of the States.
    Eric Kim: But yeah, I would say, choose now, obviously, if you’re super, you know.
    Eric Kim: quant genius, autistic genius, then do all the cold storage stuff. But if in doubt, just the simplest thing is, coinbase seems to be the best. Okay, so this is kind of my free money hack. So I call this microstrategy, strategy, mstr microstrategy versus bitcoin. And okay, so it’s very, very simple. So this becomes a philosophical debate. To say it short.
    Eric Kim: I think the ultimate goal is to own Bitcoin, he or she, or the entities with the owners of the most Bitcoin shall win. And so for me, philosophically, you know, let us say that you could own, you know, 20 bitcoins, or you could own 2 million dollars worth of micro strategy. Mstr. Stock. Right?
    Eric Kim: 1020, 30 years from now, right?
    Eric Kim: You’re going to actually outperform. You’re actually going to make more money from microstrategy stock than Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, historically, has been 60% to 62% AR annual rate of return micro strategies is almost double that 120 to 1, 25 AR. So if you actually want to maximize your returns. You just buy microstrategy stock mstr and bitcoin. Right? But the issues is, you know. Let us say that Michael Saylor gets shot. He gets killed. He
    Eric Kim: you know, dies in a Cybertruck, whatever. Right? Then, it’s probably not going to be the world’s best future for microstrategy. So it’s actually much more risky. So if you want the least risky option, it’s just put all your money into Bitcoin right? And some millennial living strategies. Right? So the the simplest strategy I have. I call it the Spartan strategy. This is why I personally follow. Is you essentially try to live as minimally and frugally and sparse as you can, and just put literally 90% of your income into bitcoins right?
    Eric Kim: And a free money hack I discovered. So, for example, let’s say you have $150,000 or €150,000. Right? And you know I’m not 100 sure how it works. If you’re a European. What is right. But you, you buy micro strategy stocks. So let’s say you buy, you know, 100,000 or $150,000 worth of it right? And Mstr, and you use fidelity, or robinhood, or whatever trading app you have. Right.
    Eric Kim: And the strategy is simple. It’s whenever you know. Let us say the base case 150,000.
    Eric Kim: Let’s say your microstrategy stock value then goes up to 200,000. Right?
    Eric Kim: You sell $50,000 worth of it, and then you just transfer that to your bank account.
    Eric Kim: and then your bank account is linked with your coinbase account. Then you just buy the Bitcoin right and rinse and repeat so very, very impressive over the last 3 months, I started with initial seed capital of around $150,000 in microstrategy stock
    Eric Kim: off of that $150,000 right? And I haven’t even touched my principal. I yielded $242,000
    Eric Kim: off of that initial 150,000 right? And also for traditional Roth, Roth, Ira retirement accounts. I put everything into microstrategy stock, and it is already like 3 x like, for example.
    Eric Kim: My roth, Ira, just kind of randomly was like what $78,000, and then the course of 3 months. It’s like now, it’s like 230,000. It peaked at around 300,000. So it’s going to be a good future. And so the the very simple strategy. So let us say you’re able to get down your living expenses to let’s say
    Eric Kim: you know, 5,000 bucks a month or €5,000 a month. Right?
    Eric Kim: the point isn’t to just make a bunch of money and just go out and buy the Lambo. The the goal is actually to continue to live for good. If anything live more fully. People who says like, Oh, you know, you want to get rich, don’t care about money or whatever. If you’re a real real greedy, you know money, loving person. Actually, the optimal strategy is.
    Eric Kim: you live, you know. You continue driving your old Toyota Prius, and just pour all of your money in Bitcoin, because really the truth is and this is my philosophical thought is, there’s almost nothing worth on the planet purchasing.
    Eric Kim: Besides, Bitcoin is my philosophical thought. So and also some e even more super smart economic leverage. Right?
    Eric Kim: So instead of paying an arm and a leg for rent in La or New York. Brooklyn, you just move to like Southeast Asia. Right you go. Move to Southeast Asia, live like a king, for like 300 500 bucks a month. Right? You just put all your money to Bitcoins right? So even if you had a modest savings, right, let’s say you had like $200,000, and you had microstrategy stock.
    Eric Kim: let’s say every month of the month is rent is due, and the expenses are due right? You just sell a small portion of that stock, and it’s going to go up. So my thought on the next 4 years, micro strategy, assuming it’s around 2 x Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is going to go up 120% error. I think micro strategy is going to double that 240% error. So just do the masses. At the end of every single month
    Eric Kim: you make a small. Your gains go up like crazy right, and let’s say your living expenses are like under a thousand bucks, or if you, if you live in the States, 5,000 bucks, you sell X amount of monies to just support your living expenses, and you just continue to ride your gains. But ultimately my personal thought is whatever excess, money and capital you have just put it onto Bitcoin. So the micro strategy then ends up becoming the engine or the turbocharger or the cash cow. You milk it, and you shave the cream off the top, and then you buy Bitcoin with it.
    Eric Kim: So I think the reason why to me Bitcoin is such a fascinating thing, and very exciting, is essentially Bitcoin is digital photography. Peter Diamandis, the ex guy. Right? You know, he talks a lot about kodak film. You know the iphone and disruption.
    Eric Kim: So actually, intuitively, as photographers and digital photographers, we should actually understand. You know, this disruptive power about digital photography. So obviously, you have the hipsters with their mustaches and their flannels, you know, talking about the virtues of film photography.
    Eric Kim: But the truth is, digital photography is like a quadrillion times better.
    Eric Kim: And also currently, in the year 2025, incoming
    Eric Kim: digital photography is actually superior to film photography. I mean.
    Eric Kim: maybe in the early days of digital sucked right. But now, at this point, digital photography is far superior to any sort of film photography, and the only reason you should film in today’s world
    Eric Kim: is either as like a practice to appreciate the joys of photography. So the philosophical approach.
    Eric Kim: or you know, you’re trying to be some sort of like, you know, snoppy fine art photographer and overcharge money for your photos. Then you shoot film.
    Eric Kim: because honestly, the the fine art market, they’re always going to overvalue film photos over digital photos, because it’s more complicated. It’s more strange, right? So in the art, in the art world, the more complicated, abstruse, and complicated, you can make your art the better. But for us.
    Eric Kim: where you care about practical things, yeah, think about Bitcoin. So think about the iphone iphone pro versus your mom’s kodak Browning camera. I think the the thought is obvious. Okay.
    Eric Kim: so how to start buying Bitcoin. Very simple. Just download the coinbase app, or you know if you if you don’t want to actually own Bitcoin, you just want to make a ton of money, just buy micro strategy stock Mstr, and use your traditional
    Eric Kim: accounts. And I still think that this is the biggest thing is that everyone wants to become a millionaire, right?
    Eric Kim: But you know what I think people want to do is
    Eric Kim: they don’t want to earn like, okay, okay.
    Eric Kim: people want to spend a million dollars.
    Eric Kim: They don’t want to actually save and build a million dollars right? And so if you think about, you know, money and
    Eric Kim: capital digital capital, I think about like Lego bricks, right? I just went to Legoland. Senecall is great. So let us say that
    Eric Kim: each bitcoin, or dollar or 1 million dollars like these. Let’s say these are Lego bricks right? The goal is, you want to build your Lego Tower brick thing as tall as possible. You don’t ever want to
    Eric Kim: get rid of your bricks and throw into the trash. That’s essentially what consumerism is. And this is actually another big philosophical thing I discovered is, what’s the difference between capitalism and consumerism. Consumerism is actually the exact opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is about accumulating wealth.
    Eric Kim: building your capital and not spend it right. Even one of my favorite Kanye quotes is like why people make money don’t spend it. But I’d rather buy 80 gold chains go ignorant, right ignorant. And so the pernicious thing that happens in a lot of communities, especially poor communities. Right? I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. Right?
    Eric Kim: Happens to Korean people. It happens to everybody, right? Is that you know you live in a crappy apartment in K. Town with 20 other dudes. Yet you drive the brand new Bmw. And you’re not building any sort of generational wealth. Right? And so essentially, yeah, you want to build the capital and not spend it. And essentially, you want to start to intelligently leverage your capital
    Eric Kim: to give to your future kids or your descendants, or whatever you want to do. Now, the hardest thing about Bitcoin is stomaching the volatility so volatile, mean. Just it goes up, it goes down, and then, like honestly for most people, it’s going to give them like 5. 100 heart attacks over right now
    Eric Kim: I think of a Bitcoin kind of like nuclear energy, so
    Eric Kim: nuclear energy in the untamed formed is obviously toxic could cause the next Fukushima whatevers right? But if you have a bunch of smart people, engineers, nuclear physicists working in a controlled manner, right? It’s like the greatest benefit to society, because to humanity, because essentially, you’re giving people free electricity forever. Right? And
    Eric Kim: I think my personal thought is the volatility is a future not above. So the reason why Bitcoin goes up and down the sideways so much all the time, and you can have huge swings
    Eric Kim: is because you could trade a 24, 7, 365 on the weekends in the evenings. Right?
    Eric Kim: It still befuddles me that in the year 2024, 2025 like. Why is it that you know, after 5 pm. You know Eastern time, or on the weekend Saturday, Sunday like, why did they close the market? So what if there’s another Cuban missile crisis. It makes no sense right?
    Eric Kim: And also the reason why it’s so volatile is that it’s actually the most
    Eric Kim: desirable commodity on the planet. And there’s all these people with these weird Bloomberg machine terminals, whatever they are, always pegging everything to the Bitcoin. So a lot of people ask about ethereum dogecoin webs, right. I think Bitcoin is the only true.
    Eric Kim: Everything else is the false prophets. Everything else is the false coins. The immaculate conception of Bitcoin and Satoshi.
    Eric Kim: I think this is actually a big deal, because anything that is not Bitcoin, you know, ethereum and the like. They they need some sort of spokesperson, or, you know, individual to prop up the value right, whereas Satoshi, he invented it, he disappeared forever. Now the reason why this is such a big deal is that
    Eric Kim: every other crypto thing which is not Bitcoin.
    Eric Kim: It does not have a hard cap
    Eric Kim: like you could print more ethereums. You could print more. Whatever tokens you cannot print more bitcoins, and that’s that’s the big thought.
    Eric Kim: So. Volatility is vitality. Eric Kim. I actually didn’t say that. Sorry. That was actually Michael Saylor. I typed that in wrong. But essentially
    Eric Kim: you know, volatility is vitality, and the more volatile the more energy the power you have, the more vitality you have. So once again, people think of volatility as being risk. That is actually not the case. Bitcoin is going to go up forever, but it’s going to be like an extreme roller coaster and go up down, but with extreme swings it’s extreme performance. So
    Eric Kim: yeah, volatility is not risk. Volatility is just going up and down a lot, but essentially over a long enough time span. It’s going to go up forever.
    Eric Kim: So I borrowed a lot of slides quite liberally from Michael Saylor. Some of these are from his recent Microsoft. Pitch. And yeah, just go. michael.com go to his presentations looking at yourself. So I’ll just make some quick points. So
    Eric Kim: essentially, currently, Bitcoin is like a 2 trillion dollar asset class right? And this is also from Jesse Myers once in a species.com. And the reason why this is important is currently you know. Let us say the whole world’s economy is 900 trillion dollars, right? And
    Eric Kim: what we have our eyes on is real estate. So real estate is, you know, most people don’t really just use real estate as a place to live right? Otherwise, you just rent. People use it for a long term store of value. So, for example, if you’re a really really rich family from New York City, you own, like 10 square blocks in Manhattan, and, you know, does your descendants sell, you know.
    Eric Kim: a square block to buy himself a few Ferraris. No, that that would be a bad strategy. So the the tip I have for any single person trying to build intergenerational wealth. Keep it simple. Only one rule. You don’t sell the Bitcoin. If you face extreme poverty or financial distress, I don’t know. Become an Uber driver or something. Pay the bills, but don’t sell the Bitcoin.
    Eric Kim: and currently I think we’re going to see is Bitcoin is just going to take over the gold market, which is 16 trillion dollars, maybe the cars and collectible art market.
    Eric Kim: Now, a big thought is this is from Michael Saylor once again, is that
    Eric Kim: all these assets on the planet.
    Eric Kim: Some of half of it is to provide utility. Right? So, for example, you know.
    Eric Kim: let’s say you need you need somewhere to live right? No so that provides utility right? But then, again, some of it is to preserve capital right? And
    Eric Kim: as a 36 year old millennial nowadays. The pressures. Oh, you got to buy a single family home today, right? But the the reason I get so sus of people saying you should buy a house is that they’re like, oh, you essentially need somewhere to live. You’ll build capital. Blah! Blah, right? You don’t want to give money to land, but it’s like no, you only need one reason like you would only ever buy a single family house. If let’s say you really like having a backyard and a garage, or what is right. But it’s really not
    Eric Kim: a money making thing, because homeownership is like a trillion, times more expensive than you would otherwise think, and as a consequence, with a single family home, even if the price is going up right
    Eric Kim: at best, you might be breaking, even if not, you know, slowly bleeding yourself. Because, let’s say, real estate is on average, going up 10% a year, right? The money supply the inflationary. M 2 supply is 15% a year. So you’re actually kind of losing money.
    Eric Kim: So the big thought is once again, you know.
    Eric Kim: the optimistic thought is eventually all these long term sort of things are going to become digital capital. I still think about this, the Warren Buffett. They’re all gonna die. And then, when we, you know, take the take the mantle. What’s gonna happen the next 20 years, even if you’re 80 years old right now? 81 years old. Shout out.
    Eric Kim: You know, I think I’m optimistic. We could live to be 100 20. So yeah, this is definitely the next wave. You’re not going to want to miss right? And you know, currently a lot of millennials. People like everyone wants to buy the Lambo or the Ferrari.
    Eric Kim: You’re you’re going to lose the value of it in about 3 years. You want to live forever.
    Eric Kim: So these are some kind of conservative growth estimates, according to Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin 24 model. So in about 21 years, and this was still pretty conservative. Right? Bitcoin is going to become a 280 trillion dollar, you know thing right? So going from 2 trillion to 200 trillion, so at least 10 x. So you’re conservatively, you’re going to see your money at least 10 x in 21 years, which is pretty cool. Right? It’s not going to take over all these other things. It might, but it might not.
    Eric Kim: Now people always ask.
    Eric Kim: what is Bitcoin backed by? So I did the maths right and based on what other people say, too essentially the Bitcoin network. If you took all the apple Amazon aws servers, Meta.
    Eric Kim: combine them all times 20, you could still not hack the Bitcoin network in in terms of the raw power that goes into powering. Think about like 20 nuclear power reactors powering the thing right? And also people don’t understand is there’s already been 850 billion dollars of quote, real money investment thing follow Blackrock. They just recently recommended most of their
    Eric Kim: you know, owners to allocate at least 2% of their portfolio into Bitcoin, which is kind of a big deal. Look about what Larry Fink says. Blackrock is like what they own. What 40 trillion dollars of assets around the planet. They’re they’re kind of a big deal. And also it’s a network effect. So you remember, in the early days of Facebook. It was only it was only university students with the Edu address were allowed to join in. Then they opened up to everybody, and the network effect of Facebook is that
    Eric Kim: if you have Facebook and I have Facebook, then Facebook instantly becomes more valuable to both of us, because I can now share my photos with you, whatever’s right. But then, if your friends friends also have Facebook, it becomes much more valuable to everything. Same thing goes with facetime right. The reason why I got you know I used to be a Diehard android dude. Now I’m like all icloud everything. It makes life so much easier. You get your mom an iphone. Now you get facetime imessage. It makes life way better.
    Eric Kim: And so Bitcoin is going to be the same thing as more and more people are going to continue to download Coinbase or Whatevs. And also my optimistic thought is, if Apple doesn’t want to become irrelevant, it’s I’m very certain the next 5 to 10 years. Apple is going to have their own
    Eric Kim: Bitcoin storage thing in your icloud account. It makes sense right. They have apple pay. They have the apple wallet. Essentially.
    Eric Kim: apple is the new bank. And so now, when they do like a you know, a 3 device authentication for your bitcoins through your iphone, your ipad and your macbook pro whatevers.
    Eric Kim: It’s actually it might actually be one of the most safe ways to store your bitcoins.
    Eric Kim: Also things to think about. If you’re a traditional investor
    Eric Kim: so there’s this notion called the cost to capital cost to capital that Michael Saylor says a lot. I might be getting this wrong. But
    Eric Kim: essentially the S. And P. 500 right?
    Eric Kim: on average, is like 14 to 15% return year over year. Right? So if you’re not making at least 15% or over 15% a year, you’re essentially losing your bleeding money. So real estate gold bonds is kind of a losing bet, right? And so the magnificent 7 which all the big tech stocks 28%, a little bit better, right? But look at Bitcoin. It’s like 62% year over year. And it’s kind of the obvious bet, right?
    Eric Kim: And even if you think about you know, everyone’s talking about Nvidia Tesla. You know what is right.
    Eric Kim: I think the reason why the mainstream media they don’t like to talk about micro strategy is that it’s still a little bit too weird and bizarre. And it’s not as buzzworthy as AI, because, okay, people like to think of this like evil Terminator AI, the video going to take over the world and find it right. But nobody is like Bitcoin, like
    Eric Kim: Bitcoin is not an android walking around 2 feet, taking over the planet right? So people actually don’t like to talk about Bitcoin. And for so long people thought that Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme right. No one ever thought that AI was a Ponzi scheme. So the video always catches the headlines. But look at microstrates, look at the best performing stock on the human unit in the human universe
    Eric Kim: over 3 x. That of Nvidia, which is already impressive, and Nvidia is already destroying Tesla by a massive margin as well. Right? So
    Eric Kim: I mean? That’s that’s pretty obvious, right?
    Eric Kim: Even Donald Trump watches a Nashville presentation. He quotes Michael Saylor directly, says, Never sell your Bitcoin. Apparently Eric Trump, the son of Donald Trump has known Michael Saylor for 20 years. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but if that’s the case.
    Eric Kim: I’m like a hundred percent certain that. You know, Michael Saylor essentially has the left ear of Donald Trump.
    Eric Kim: And yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a very good thing.
    Eric Kim: So if you want to plug and create your own models. Google, the Bitcoin, 24 model. It’s on Github
    Eric Kim: plug in your own assumptions.
    Eric Kim: And this is the big thing that I have my eyes set on. So currently, you know, it’s December right? And everyone’s waiting for the trump to get into the office January 20.th So this is a tricky thing. So I used to be Super Anti Donald Trump, right? Because I could care less about politics and stuff like that right? And
    Eric Kim: but
    Eric Kim: one Donald Trump became super super pro bitcoin. I started to listen and start watching all his interviews and looking like honestly the you know, I’m from the Bay Area like Liberal Democrat, my whole life right? And actually, I kind of realized, wow, the the left leaning media is kind of the they’re kind of the evil ones here. And Donald Trump, he seems actually kind of like a cool, nice nice nice guy, right?
    Eric Kim: And the big thought is.
    Eric Kim: there’s no, there’s not going to be a World war 3. What is right? And Bitcoin, under the trump administration is gonna explode, and it’s gonna be the
    Eric Kim: the greatest 4 years of prosperity of all time, and this once again coming from like a super left leaning liberal. So this is a good thought so. Anyways. Let us say, you know.
    Eric Kim: America leads the charge in the crypto Bitcoin revolution. Right? And yeah, I think
    Eric Kim: assuming that America really wants to control the future. I think the America purchasing 6 million bitcoins is not fully out of this this planet. Right?
    Eric Kim: So some thoughts on building personal family wealth.
    Eric Kim: So the reason why I think this is kind of a big deal is that
    Eric Kim: everyone wants to build wealth right. Everyone wants to be intelligent with their investing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nonprofit, a charity, a church, Mother Teresa, like every single organization, will always need money. Capital. If you have an endowment, you know, for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford Brown University. Whatever even the Uc. Is right, everyone needs money and capital right.
    Eric Kim: and I don’t like to think too much about the macro, because I’m not an institutional investor. I just think about myself, my family, my best friends, my squad. Right? So the goal is building personal family wealth and how to intelligently invest. So a lot of people talk about timings. Oh, when should I buy Bitcoin? Should I time it the high. Then people take out these charts and these candlesticks, which is all just witchcraft and pseudoscience don’t follow any of that.
    Eric Kim: Essentially the thought is.
    Eric Kim: anytime is a good time to buy Bitcoin if it’s high, low, Middle, whatever. We’re going to keep buying the top forever. So recently I bought some more Bitcoin at $100,000. Right then it dipped down to 90,000 to 88,000 hit 103,000 again, and so I’m pretty sure that in 1020 years I’m going to be buying Bitcoin at 1 million, a Bitcoin, 10 million dollars a Bitcoin, 55 million dollars a Bitcoin, whatever is right, and because if you do the simple math, just think at least 4 years ahead, right? So if I could tell you with 100 certainty that Bitcoin is going to be 1.2 million a Bitcoin
    Eric Kim: in 4 years
    Eric Kim: as long as you’re buying it for less than a million dollars a coin. You’re going to be in the green like it’s it’s kind of a a good bet, right? And actually, also, ironically, my personal thought is
    Eric Kim: chasing gains is a good thing, but also it’s it’s a good idea to not get quote greedy in the sense of maximizing your gains. So so, for example, right like, what’s the difference between getting a 38% yield and a 32% yield like the the difference is nominal. Don’t don’t worry so much about maximization, because even a lot of what I thought my trades were bad
    Eric Kim: 2 years ago ended up being right. So as investors, we have to think at least 410-20-3040 years ahead of us. So don’t worry so much about the the short term
    Eric Kim: so practical and pragmatic investing strategies right? So once again, so if I had a simple blueprint, so
    Eric Kim: some some simple thoughts.
    Eric Kim: there’s lots of different blends. You could do this, you could. You could be super simple. Just 100 to Bitcoin, buy it on Coinbase what is right, and just keep stacking forever.
    Eric Kim: 100 legitimate. That’s the Bitcoin Maximus opposed the triple, triple Maxi, the triple Maximalist approach. If you just need to pay the bills whatever, and still stack the Bitcoins. My personal suggestion is put 80% of your wealth into Bitcoin and 20% of your wealth into micro strategy Mstr stock. And once again. This is this is what you do. So let’s say, for simplicity of math. Let’s say
    Eric Kim: Let’s say you have a million dollars or a hundred $1,000, or you use whatever kind of a number you want, right? So put 20% that to microstrategy stock whenever it goes up
    Eric Kim: beyond the principal, sell some of that stock and put that into micro strategies. Sorry. Put that into Bitcoin, and or use that money to just pay your your bills. So once again what I personally did right?
    Eric Kim: $150,000 working capital into micro strategy Mstr stock. And let’s say, when it goes from worth $150,000 to $160,000. I’ll sell $10,000 worth that stock. That $10,000 gets deposited to my checking account, which is linked to my coinbase. Then I’ll just buy $10,000 worth of bitcoin right? Or, if you need that, $10,000
    Eric Kim: for living expenses. Let’s say
    Eric Kim: you need $3,000 to pay your rent. You take $3,000 of that to pay your rent, and you put the other 7% of that into Bitcoin.
    Eric Kim: also some other definition. What’s the difference between being an investor, a trader versus speculator?
    Eric Kim: So an investor, we want to be investors. We want to think about (102) 030-4050 years ahead of us. A trader is a bunch of these, like 20 year old. High testosterone degenerates, you know, single, you know, maybe addicted drugs, or whatever right, who just want to like look cool. I made a billion dollars in a month by using all these complicated
    Eric Kim: statistical models. Blah! Blah! Right? But you don’t. You don’t want to be a trader because essentially it’s
    Eric Kim: nobody could time the market. Not even God could time the market right. And what a speculator is people who invest in meme coins. So a meme coin is like buying a Dogecoin or shiba Inu, that the reason why these are not you should not do this is that it is extremely dangerous. You’re going to lose all your money, and it requires
    Eric Kim: a charismatic leader to support it. So Dogecoin, right? Dogecoin is essentially elon musk coin right?
    Eric Kim: But if one day Elon musk tweets. Ha! Ha! Doge was just a joke all along, right. It’s not worth anything. The value of it will pump it to 0, or if once again. Elon dies in a you know a robo taxi accident. The value of dogecoin is going to go to 0, whereas if Elon Musk dies, you know Bitcoin is going to still keep going up forever. So speculator is meme coins beyond bitcoin us Bitcoiners. We’re we’re investors.
    Eric Kim: So you know, somebody also asked about, you know, monetary inflation right? So there’s this thing called the M. 2 monetary supply of the the rate rate inflation.
    Eric Kim: And once again you’re going to have to exceed at least 13% to 15% to
    Eric Kim: not lose money. So, for example, let us say, you have a billion dollars of us dollars in your checking account. Right? You’re going to be bled to death. Right? So in a year, your 1 billion dollar is going to shrink to 750 million down to 500 million, to 350 million. And essentially, you’re going to get a point where your money is worthless.
    Eric Kim: And already we see this right now. So currently, the price of real estate, single family homes is exploding. But this is my critical view. How much of that is that the value of a single family house is higher versus our Us. Dollars are just simply worthless. Right? So if you just do the same simple maths, right?
    Eric Kim: So let us say that. You know, minimum wage goes from $15 an hour to $20 an hour overnight for Mcdonald’s worker. Right? That means instantly. You see, 25% inflation. So your 1 million dollars in the bank is now worth only 750
    Eric Kim: $1,000. So yeah, once again. The real real rich people. They store less than 1% of their wealth in
    Eric Kim: Us. Dollars in their checking account like, you’re not gonna have Jeff Bezos bragging to other people that he has 10 billion dollars of us dollars in their checking account. No, it’s it’s all going to be in you know, stocks, or, you know, real estate. And actually, ideally, Bitcoin. Cyber cyber capital.
    Eric Kim: So yeah, that’s that’s essentially the the end of my presentation.

  • New Protocols

    New Protocols

    So I thought the other day; now that I live in LA, Culver City… Life is different now than I was living in the suburbs of Orange County, like a two minute drive to my local gym etc.

    And also, the tricky thing is that with the winter months, things are also different.

    I recall that in the early mornings, when I was living in the OC, I would just put on my daily gym attire, drive to the gym, immediately hit the hot sauna wore myself up. But now things are a little bit trickier now that when I wake up in the morning, sometimes ridiculously early, the apartment is still cold, not a super strong impetus for me to go outside. 

    Also, now where I live, is practically like 100%, 100 out of 100 walkability score. Here in Culver City, I’m living a walker’s paradise!

    Now the reason why this is so important is that I’m kind of finally starting to figure out how critical it is for me to change my mindset, my approach, my protocol.

    Also, now that Cindy is a century working full-time, and more often than not my time is a little more limited, the way I approach fitness is obviously changing and must change.

    Recent innovations I’m happy for is after making a ton of money off of Microstrategy, buying two 50kg calibrated steel plates, which is about 110 pounds a plate.  it has been super super fun and cool because even lifting it up to rack it unto the barbell is a workout in itself! Also, have the time I’m just walking around town with Seneca, this might be the most walking I’ve ever done in my life, and all his arm carry him, and I’ve been noticing that also, my biceps are becoming a lot more buff and impressive. Even to myself!

    Switching up the protocol

    Even another weird thing is that as of late, I find that going on my walks my morning walks I was actually more important than lifting weights? I suppose the way I am able to double dip is that I’m like almost always wearing my 60pound weight vest, All day every day. 

    So first, with exercise and fitness, I guess it is critical for me to change my mindset, and also my protocol on what to do, why I do it etc.

    Also, what I think is so paradigm shattering with bitcoin is that now that we are all sons of bitcoin (Michael Saylor, @saylor tweet), we also have to change and replace and recapitalize on bitcoin as our base, concrete, bedrock foundation.

    For example, if you’re building cyber Manhattan for the 22nd century, you don’t build it on bedrock on the main island. If you’re going to build in cyberspace, you need a totally new protocol, a totally new paradigm mindset.

    Stick shift?

    Every single car that I have purchased in my adult life has always been a stick shift Manual transmission car, five speed. And also my pride is I have never spent more than $3000 USD on a car in my whole adult life and I’m 36 years old, and the first bitcoin blogger photographer street photography millionaire that I know. Maybe the only one in the universe that was self-made?

    How do you know if your self-made or not? If you practically had a single mom, who waited tables, clean houses, worked as a cashier, and also had a dad who would gamble away the rent money, threatening your mom with physical violence, and also mental violence if she didn’t cough up the rent money.

    Now consider how pernicious this is; the real critical issue here is that not only are you trying to fight to stay afloat, but you’re also actively having somebody unplugging the hot water bath water.

    I think this is also something that people who don’t understand growing up in a family of economic peril; once again it’s not just having two hard-working parents, struggling to work to minimum wage jobs just to pay the rent and expenses and put food on table; no, it is one mom working full-time While having a father who did not work ever since you were two years old, while actively gambling away the rent money. Double bad.

    2025

    We live in a really bizarre time, and I bet you it’s going to just get more and more bizarre. Once Donald Trump takes office January 20, 2025… You’ll see a huge paradigm shift.

    First, obviously this will be good for us bitcoiners because bitcoin is going to go through the roof! Just look at the riveting talk that ERIC Trump did at the bitcoin conference in Abu Dhabi, in essentially which he says that he is confident that bitcoin is going to get to $1 million a coin.

    The reason why I feel like this is very very important to watch is that because he is a son of the incoming president, he will actually do everything in his power to make sure this manifested as a reality. 

    Funny enough, I didn’t even know that Donald Trump had a son named Eric Trump, I guess all guys whose first name is ERIC our geniuses! And also ERIC Semler of similar scientific, another ERIC! And also another ERIC Balchanus, like one of the head ETF guys at Bloomberg, his name is also ERIC? We gotta make an ERIC squad! 

    Why new protocols are so difficult

    Once again, if you’ve been riding a horse and buggy whole life, and I pull up in a matte black cyber truck, what will be your reaction? Your mind will absolutely be blown, your jaw will drop, you’re going to think that the person in the cyber truck is like some sort of alien god. Even a fully rational person will probably drop on his knees, and start repenting for his sins whatever.

    Or, let us say that I drop you into the 1950s, and selling that you pull up with a brand new iPhone Pro, and you go to the head of Kodak and telling them that you came from the future and that this iPhone thing will totally disrupt their business. What would their reaction be?

    Why photographers and digital photographers should intuitively understand bitcoin

    We are all passionate about photography yet for a lot of us, we make our money elsewhere. But if you were like an investor in Kodak, and I came from the future and I told you that this thing would come along and totally destroy your business and you’ll go broke, unless you shift and embrace this new economic protocol and innovation, isn’t the wise thing to adopt the change? 

    Even Peter Diamandis said “Bitcoin is digital photography”. or, “bitcoin is the iPhone”. 

    You know this often tied phrase that a lot of these skinny fat bearded flannel wearing salty loser say “Humph! Everyone thinks that they’re a photographer now!” (Yes the truth is everyone is a guitar for now, and this is a good thing.)

    I wonder if the same sentiment exist amongst acid fund managers “with bitcoin, everyone thinks that they’re an investor now!”

    I think all of us, if you’ve been following me since the beginning, don’t you know that we have all always been anti-establishment, anti-“the man“,– if so, shouldn’t you embrace bitcoin with open arms?

    We the new goats!

    I think the reason why paradigm shifts are so difficult to understand and embrace is that once again this is a big deal. For example, the paradigm shift of bitcoin is like if you suddenly came up to Michael Jordan, and told him that the whole time he’s been playing the game wrong, or that they totally changed the rules of the game, certainly wouldn’t he be confused, and upset?

    Embracing the new is hard

    One thing I learned from the ERIC Trump talk is that apparently, the protocol for email was around for like 25 years before anyone actually really decided to use it. And now for most of us, it might be the most critical way to communicate, and magically teleport messages all across the planet.

    I think for so long we’ve been stuck in this kind of fatalist mindset about the whole banking system, financial system whatever; now that we are living the year 2024, the year 2025, come on… Why are the banks closed after like 5 PM Eastern time? And why are the traditional stock markets closed on Saturdays and Sundays, when we all have these super Ultramega computers that could take us to Mars and back?

    Like let us consider you know the story when they say that apparently, the computers that got us to the moon were like half of the computing power of like a TI 84 calculator? Isn’t that the same error in which the operating protocols for the NASDAQ stock exchange were invented?

    Also, during those times, America was the only center of the universe, Singapore wasn’t really on the global stage, nor Dubai or any of these other global super power nations. As a consequence, everything revolved either around New York Manhattan time, or London time. So being able to operate on the protocol of these random arbitrary American numbers were common.

    Now that once again, we are a global planet, don’t we need some sort of global capital token that could instantaneously trade hands, 24 seven, 365, all day every day, with no delay no lag no friction, no annoying middleman?

    the middle mans feel at risk? 

    Let us say that your job is to manage other people’s money, and that your well-being and money comes from other people being dependent on you, your financial services etc., if that is the case, wouldn’t you be interested to have other people always be dependent on you?

    You don’t need no middleman

    I almost feel that middleman, are like the biggest parasites to society.

    For example, kind of a low-key super greedy bad thing, in their early days of text messaging, SMS messaging, apparently it cost nothing for these huge telecommunications platforms to transfer and facilitate a text message exchange. Like it was already running on the same rails, and that to send a text message did not cost the carrier $.10 or whatever, it was free for them but they charged you an arm and a leg. 

    Similarly speaking, do you remember in the early days of smart phones, you’re forced to sign some sort of arbitrary to your contract, before actually signing up for a phone plan? This was like some terrible mafioso thing.

    I almost wonder, maybe, now, starting next year, people are finally starting to wake up to their senses and realize how traditional banking is such a scam.

    Also other arbitrary things, like… You need to maintain a certain bank balance for the checking account to be free, and also these pernicious overdraft fees, late fees etc.? Do you remember like the early days of blockbuster?

    Even apparently, when I was listening to an interview with ERIC Semler, when he met the executive a blockbuster and told him that Netflix was almost an existential threat to them… Most of these executives at Blockbuster just laughed directly in their faces, and told them to leave. Where is blockbuster today?

    I almost feel like this is going to happen to everything. Everything is going to be disrupted, whether we like it or not. The intelligent strategy is to accept embrace and integrate these new protocols.

    For example, obviously the Internet as we know it today is already running the planet. Imagine if 20 years ago your company did not embrace the Internet, where would you be today?

    What is bitcoin?

    , Bitcoin is like the new Internet, except in some ways it is far more valuable because it actually deals with money. Why is this so important? The reason why this is so important is that money is actually more important than technology, or money might be the most important technology. 

    For example, let me give you example; obviously I love ChatGPT and AI, but I could live without it. Things will be less optimal, but still, I could live life without ChatGPT. But could you live life without money? No.

    And honestly at this point, you need the Internet. If you don’t have access to Wi-Fi, at home, at the local coffee shop, if you don’t have 4G or 5G cellular data on your phone, you’re absolutely screwed.

    How was wolverine made?

    This is an interesting analogy, I think the way that they made wolverine is that they replaced his entire skeleton with adamantine steel. A very painful process. But this made him invincible pretty much.

    They call him weapon X.

    Maybe the process of bitcoin is like the same thing, if somebody took out your whole exoskeleton your bones everything your ligaments, and you’re forced to replace it with some sort of new add a man times steel, even if it did make you immortal, certainly you would not like the process very much because it will be excruciatingly painful.

    Who doesn’t want to live forever?

    Everyone must die, you must die. But if I could promise you immortality, in 100 perfect health and vigor and happiness and joy, wouldn’t you take it? Probably.

    Bitcoin is like heaven on earth?

    So what is the difference between bitcoin and every other asset? Bitcoin will last forever like 100,000 years, 1 million years, 100 million years etc. You’re shabby real estate might last 30, 40 years?

    Think long

    Apparently Jeff Bezos invested in this thing called like the 100,000 year clock, which will apparently run and work for like 100,000 years. And the reason why this is a critical thing is that course is us to think about the long-term.

    Even the reason why I think Jeff Bezos might be one of the most underrated entrepreneurs of all time is that he really really really played the long game with Amazon, pretty much projecting the dominance of Amazon, over the course of 20-30 years. 

    So in the early days of Amazon, when Jeff Bezos was still transporting books to the local post office in his Honda accord, and I came from the future and I told you that one day, he in Amazon would send you run the planet, what would you have told me? You would’ve probably laughed in my face.

    Or, that Apple, in the early days of Apple, like when they’ll still Wozniak and Steve Jobs in their garage building Apple two computer computers that once again, they would be like a $3 trillion company, what would you have said to me? You would’ve thought I was a fool!

    But then again, once again, to think about the future, 20 or 30 years is not only difficult, but requires grand creativity, almost like a detachment from modern reality. If you are too stuck in the present, you’ll never become anything grand.

    buy big become big

    I was reading some newspaper article or television thing about how after the bitcoin boom, like the number of bitcoin millionaires, or people with over X amount of bitcoin in their wallet has exploded.

    What are my bitcoin price projections? Considering that we’re going to have non-Trump the first bitcoin president, and his blood son, ERIC Trump in his left ear, we’re definitely going to see the bitcoin act pass, the senator Cynthia Lummis act, in which America will probably purchase at least 1 million bitcoins. If and when this happens, you’re definitely going to see a mad rush and explosion in the value of bitcoin.

    Why? Like Michael Saylor said, if you were an evil genius, and you were America, the smart strategy is to sell all of your gold and demonetized and deepen the capital assets of your enemy, Russia and China, and all the other BRICS nations, because then, assuming if America owns like 25% of the bitcoin network, then suddenly you get this insanely phenomenal best trade of all time:

    1. You essentially demonetize “debank” the assets of China Russia etc., which still stores a lot of their wealth in gold.
    2. You get a free trade, you don’t have to print more US dollars to purchase more bitcoins, you just use already existing gold reserves. 
    3. You essentially make your country, America, the center of the economic planet, your conquer cyberspace, which is the next frontier, and you essentially control it forever.
    4. You then back the US dollar stable coin with your bitcoin reserves, and then you make the US dollar coin the dominant coin of the planet.

    Isn’t this obvious?

    What is the American ethos?

    Bet big, dominate, control it all!

    ERIC

  • Think Rockefeller

    Think Rockefeller

    We the new Rockefellers!

    ROC nation!

    So I guess Jay was really onto something; numbers don’t lie check the scoreboard! And also thinking about building his own Rockefeller ROCAFELLER Rocawear brand. I’m also sure that Michael Saylor is the new Rockefeller for this century and beyond. 

    Oil

    Oil standard oil. Rockerfeller is stupid rich, became stupid dumb rich because he sent you bought up all the oil, oil companies, oil refineries etc., consolidated them all under his own company, even at Brown University in Providence, the main library is called the rock, Named after Rockefeller I think either donated the money to build the library or something?

    Anyways, what is more important than money? Capital.

    I think what a lot of people don’t understand is the logic of capital. A lot of people get stuck in this whole money idea, like Fiat currency.

    So for example, I’ve essentially made a small fortune already on bitcoin and microstrategy stock, MSTR, bitcoin and like, and I’m not really gonna be shocked when my net worth hits 100 M, 250 M, maybe even 1.1 billion in my lifetime. But still most likely, I’m going to drive the same old Prius, maybe I’ll matte black it, I actually had a vision of Matt like it kind of making it look like a BMW M3 in the front, with the bright yellow headlights. Like imagine the Prius, competition edition.

    Anyways, rappers are dead, we new BITCOINERS, we the new rockstars!

    Why?

    So once again, it feels like the early days of the Internet. Do you remember the early days of AOL, AWOL 3.0, when they would mail you these free CDs with like 1000 hours of free Internet? And the mad scramble for the Internet, like Alta Vista net zero, yahoo and the like.

    The Google of internet capital

    My personal thought is do you remember when Google first emerged, and everyone was a bit confused by it, a little Rinky dinky search engine with nothing but the Google logo, a small search box in engine? And suddenly it takes over the planet?

    What I find very very bizarre is all these Google employees… They should get it… Why aren’t they buying bitcoin?

    What is hilarious is that innovation that got Google to where it is today… The paradox of the innovators dilemma; Google is like the new Microsoft, no more innovation here. Rather, a mad scramble to inject advertisements into every single part of your existence. Even for example, I’m starting to really hate Google and YouTube; Too many advertisements, too much spam, I hate Google. 

    In fact I have not used Google search for almost like six months, I just use ChatGPT now, ChatGPT search. ChatGPT is a bit problematic too, but not as bad as Google.

    The bitcoin imperative

    So once again, if you discovered clean fresh water, and everybody else is drinking sewer water, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to tell your friends your family everybody you know about clean water? And to get them to stop drinking sewer water? Obviously! But what if you’ll hurt their feelings or make them feel uncomfortable? Well I guess you don’t really care about them, you could let them just die of dysentery.

    The new Oregon Trail

    So once again, everyone is on this Oregon Trail video game, and sooner or later everyone dies of dysentery. And I still will never forget playing Oregon Trail in computer class in Bayside Queens, PS 169, and spending all my money on bullets to just shoot the auction in the squirrels, only need to die of dysentery.

    Anyways, I think we’re almost living our new modern day version of the Oregon Trail, and we are starting to get distracted by things like media the Internet social media iPhones etc.… We are all slowly dying of metaphorical dysentery.

    In the Oregon Trail, you have the option to purchase medicine. But medicine seems a bit boring to buy when you could buy bullets instead!

    But once again in the video game, when you least expected in your troop gets sick, and you no longer have any money because you spent it all on blitz… Who are you going to blame?

    Of course it is a video game, real life is different. But everything is often just a metaphor for real life.

    4+ years in the game

    So technically I’ve been in the bitcoin game since 2017, 2018. When I was living off the grid in Vietnam, in Saigon, I still remember going to my favorite coffee shop, reading zero hedge, and learning about bitcoin, and I still remember the guy who said that he was so certain that bitcoin was gonna go from $300 a bitcoin to 600 bitcoin to 1000 bitcoin, and if he was wrong he would eat his balls live on television.

    I first learned about fiat currency then, when I had more time to think and consider and just philosophize about money. I sent you learned that all money was fake, but at the time I did not yet have a strong need or urge or reason to buy bitcoin then because I was already retired at the age of 26, 28. Living for rent was only $320 a month in Vietnam, essentially I knew and learned that I would never run out of money.

    Anyways, fast-forward a bit, now living in LA, obviously the cost of living is far higher. So more recently I kind of had more of a need to know and learn.

    if you don’t need it you won’t act

     Most people who are financially already doing well and comfortable, they don’t really have a need to know. For example if you already have a bunch of Tesla stock, real estate or whatever… Then the truth is you don’t really have a strong need to know about bitcoin. Because you don’t really need it in the sense that you’re probably gonna be just fine with your traditional stocks, your Tesla stock your Nvidia stock your real estate whatever.

    I think a lot of people are starting to wake up now, especially millennials, Gen Z, and “zillenials” (Soren Zhane told me)

     anyways, I don’t know a single human being on the planet who does not seek some sort of financial independence and or security. Certainly everyone has a different reason but the general guiding principle is that everybody wants freedom for one reason or another. For example, some people just don’t want to work no more, which is 100% almost everybody?

    I don’t know any single tech worker who actually wants to be there; there are simply stuck because they are stuck into some sort of stock option plan, or because they have an expensive mortgage, or because they got like their four children in private school whatever.

    Or it seems that a lot of people in my friends that I know or around my age born in 1988, plus or minus 4 years, like people who are either 32, 34, 36, 40, 42 years old… Once again, everyone wants independent and wants to retire right now! And it seems that everyone’s plan is trying to securitize some sort of  fixed income strategy, like let us say that your living expenses are like seven to $8000 a month, to have some sort of “passive income“, just sustain your cost-of-living. 

    So in terms of fixed income strategies, I think it’s actually super simple, just leverage microstrategy stock! The mantra is don’t sell your bitcoin, but, it is 100% fine to sell your microstrategy stock!

    So let us say that you have $1 million of stock, or cash or whatever… It is super super simple: just put 100% at that micro strategy style, and once, every month, end of month, when it is time to pay your rent or whatever, just sell a small portion to pay your rent, if it’s like $3200 a month or something. And then, you just ride the gains forever, and essentially your microstrategy stock will be the cash cow for the rest of your life. 

    Why don’t people like simple solutions?

    I think somebody is trying to sell you some sort of complicated product. Like all these fake ass money investors, none of which or whom we’re actually successful, they will sell you some sort of strange financial product which is mixed between a bunch of these other fake investments, Stocks bonds ETF’s whatever, and actually… My funny thought is there might be some sort of inherent dangers in diversification.

    For example, let us say that you have cash money. Do you diversify your cash holdings from US dollars to the Nigerian currency, to the Venezuela currency, to North Korean currency, to the Japanese yen, to the Korean Won, to the Boliviar, the British pound, to the Lebanese lira, etc.?

    Or, if you’re building a skyscraper, do you diversify the steel into balsa wood and copper? 

    Or, let us say that you have a smart phone, most smart people that I know will just own the iPhone, you want to diversify by owning an android phone, a Huawei phone, a Samsung phone, and the like.

    Why bitcoin makes sense for Americans

    Once again, at this point if you’re an American, almost universally 100% of Americans own an iPhone, even at this point poor people they all own an iPhone Pro.

    So the reason why bitcoin makes sense is that my general sense is that bitcoin is like all American. And certainly the ethos behind bitcoin, a lot of the early cyber hackers, California tech utopists, Hal Finney etc, certainly there is kind of like the cyberpunk, Blade Runner, ghost in the shell vibes here… The early days of bitcoin and crypto is certainly kind of like tech anarchists,,, nobody likes the banks. I don’t even think the bankers like the banks!


    Nobody is evil

    So there’s all these weird theories conspiracy theories whatever, but all these super evil people running the world etc. but this is false. Everybody is too stupid to run the world and be evil.

    For example, no no no it is not George Soros, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton Bill Gates trying to put 5G chips inside your brain, to sell you vegan meat. No or is it the Jewish conspiracy theory about the media Israel whatever. Everyone is inept. 

    Even Kim Jang Hoon, who is like what, 300 pounds at like 5 foot four, maybe 80% body fat, borderline about to have a heart attack, still hooked on like thousands of bottles of fine foreign whiskey, as well as having a glass full of like 1000 armored Maybach cars?

    Media has no face

    I’m kind of starting to read the principles of economics by Saifedean, and one of the useful ideas is that everyone is like an individual agent, and moves in the best of his or her interest. Everyone is rational in this sense; even people that you think are irrational, rather than trying to seek how they are so dumb compared to you, I think it is actually much more compassionate and wise to try to seek to understand why they think we act this way. Seeking understanding, seeking to understand them is more interesting and important than trying to change them to thinking and become you.

    “How dare you not be me!”

    In fact in the world where we’re trying to seek distinction, isn’t the actual goal to not to want other people to be like you?

    Also funny thought is that everyone is seeking some sort of superiority, but once again, we’re all buying into the same standard media narratives?

    Unplug yourself

    all media is bad, and yes this involves Twitter, X, and the Joe Rogan podcast.

    I think the difficult thing here is that everybody is kind of correct, but at the same time, everyone is a bit strange and bizarre.

    the matrix

    So where I think that the matrix is really really insanely great film is that it is all about reality, fake reality and the metaphor in between.

    And this is actually a funny thing that I learned; the truth and reality is not really the goal.

    For example, I think Joe Rogan has uncovered how politics really works, and it is very dirty, and very strange and bizarre. For example I’m recently listening to some of the Marc Andreesen and Joe Rogan podcast in the whole idea of debanking, when Kanye said it everyone thought he was crazy, but when Marc Andreesen says it, everyone listens. 

    Anyways, the truth is a bit distracting. And yeah yeah yeah let us say that there are aliens or extraterrestrial beings or whatever… Even if that were true I don’t think it really matters. To me matters more is like our health our physiology our minds, our philosophies, our families, our spouses and kids, our future etc.

    The next big big big big thing is already here, it is bitcoin.

     so I room is waiting for the next iPhone the next new Tesla car or whatever, the next hugely innovative product which will totally change and transform our lies. Yet don’t people understand that it is already here, that it has already been here for a minute, bitcoin!

    I think the reason why bitcoin is hard to understand, even for us take forward millennials is that it is not a tangible product like having a self driving car or a cyber truck etc. Or like having the newest iPhone Pro.

    Certainly there is a human bias for tangible things tools and assets, yet I think in reality, a better way to think about it is towards intangibles.

    For example, even modern day banking and money it is all already intangible. For example the US dollars in your bank account, ones and zeros, it is already technically all cyber and digital. Even the modern day banking swift system, it is kind of all predicated on computers and data.

    For example what is the true hard money out there? It is capital, like capital and real estate, stocks, the S&P index etc., yet what is it backed by? Gold? No. we got off the gold standard a very long time ago. It is based more on mutual understanding trust and the like.

    Even the markets, the markets are a beast, an ultra mega beast, nobody can understand it, but yet we all seek it and strive to understand it.

    Forever gains

    Once again if we think about digital metaphors digital analogies etc., this is very useful because in a physic space perspective, nothing can grow forever. For example, no man despite all of the steroids on the planet could be become a 900 pound muscular man with a six pack.

    Also, we could build maybe a 200 story skyscraper, but probably not 100,000 story skyscraper. Not even with all the steel on the planet.

    Yet with bitcoin, cyber real estate, cyber capital, this changes the game.

     for example, I live next to one of the main campuses in Culver City, 8777 Washington. They bought out this huge pit, and they are building a mega campus for Apple TV there, and they have been working on it for like over a year already. They have made very good progress but still… If you’re dealing in the realm of physics, even if they suddenly injected $1 trillion into it, you cannot build it overnight. Even if you took all the capital on the planet to build up that plot of land, it would probably take at least maybe, a few months at best.

    But with bitcoin and cyber real estate and digital capital, you can!

    For example, with bitcoin you could build $1 billion digital skyscraper in an hour or a day. Even the best skyscraper in the physical realm might take five years.

    Accelerating the cycle

    So the free money hack I’ve discovered is quite simple: buy and hold micro strategy MSTR stock, write it up, and when it is up, sell some stock, and funnel that money back into bitcoin.

    I call it like double profits, double profit double dipping.

    Kind of insane, I’ve seen and taken an initial investment around $300,000 and turned it into close to around $900,000. In the strategy was simple, just 100% putting everything into micro strategy MSTR stock. It’s insane it’s like almost a 3X gain, in a matter of about 3 to 4 months? This is absolutely unheard of. It even outperformed bitcoin by like 3X!

    Optimism for the next four years

    So my personal heartache is that the next four years, assuming that you’re on the bitcoin standard, 2025 to 2029 will be the most glorious four years of all time. In fact, I believe this could only be the last Trump presidency, but I’m quite sure that the bitcoin act will pass, ERIC will probably purchase at least 1 million bitcoins, ideally more, And America will continue her global monetary and capital dominance.

    Already, you’re seeing everyone else shudder and quake in fear. Russia and Putin, they are scared, in mainland China I’m sure they’re also scared.

    What this means for you

    So super super simple, just put 100% of your wealth and your capital in either or bitcoin and micro strategy stock.

    What’s the difference? Bitcoin is technically the risk free option. And it is also less volatile.

    Micro strategy style, MSTR is higher performance but also higher yield.

    Personally, I think the ultimate game is to stack as many bitcoins during this lifetime to pass down to your kids kids kids. And to me ultimately bitcoin is more important than micro strategies. Because bitcoin is the backbone and the underlying asset which power is everything, including micro strategy.

    For example, bitcoin can exist without microstrategy, microstrategy cannot exist without bitcoin.

    The #1 company on the planet 

    Michael sailor did it, micro strategy that owns over 400,000 bitcoin, they’re gonna hit 500,000 bitcoins, and soon they’re going to get the mythical Nakamoto, which is the mythical 1 million bitcoins and beyond. I would not be surprised if within our lifetime we see micro strategy obtain at least 2, 3, 4, or 5 million bitcoins. And we will see micro strategy become the number one dominant company on the planet, at least during this lifetime. And you see Michael sailor become the richest man on the planet, at least 10 times richer than Elon Musk.

    What does this mean to you? Assuming you put yourself your family on the bitcoin standard, you’re going to be dumb rich, forever.

    Sell the second car, sell the house, sell everything and buy the bitcoin.

    ERIC