The Everyday Millionaire Show
The Everyday Millionaire Show
Why Crypto is the Future of Money - Lark Davis (Full Podcast)
Ever wondered what draws a successful crypto influencer to the glitzy city of Dubai? Join us for a fascinating conversation with Lark Davis as he shares his journey from Pennsylvania to New Zealand, and now, the vibrant metropolis of Dubai. Discover how Dubai’s entrepreneurial spirit, strategic location, and appealing tax incentives have captivated him and his family.
Unearth the secrets behind Lark’s wildly successful YouTube crypto channel, boasting over 600,000+ subscribers since its launch in 2017. Lark reveals the highs and lows of riding the crypto wave, and how his passion for educating others has built a thriving community. This episode promises insights that could transform your financial journey.
Welcome to the Everyday Millionaire Show with Ryan Greenberg and Nick Kalfas. All right guys. Welcome back to another episode of the Everyday Millionaire Show. We're here with Lark Davis. How are you doing, lark? Doing good. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming, Lark. Where are you coming from?
Speaker 3:So based in Dubai right now. I've been here pretty recently we moved here but it's a great change. So far we're loving it.
Speaker 2:So how did I know, a little bit briefly before the show you mentioned, that you grew up in PA and then, when you were 16, you moved to New Zealand.
Speaker 3:That's right. That's right. Grew up in a very small town in Pennsylvania, very poor small Appalachian mountain town. Up in a very small town in Pennsylvania, very poor small Appalachian mountain town. You know, typical. If you've driven through that part of the country, which I'm sure you guys have, being in Maryland, then you've seen, you know those sort of small towns. That's one of the small towns I was from and for some reason my mom got this crazy idea let's move to New Zealand. Basically, we want to get just somewhere right into the world, and that's what we did. New Zealand basically want to get just somewhere right into the world, and that's what we did. So she had a little bit of money saved up and just that was it. We went and moved to New Zealand and then it was quite the change. Quite the change. You know it's funny. I actually went back to Pennsylvania for like a short trip when I was like 17. I was like holy cow. I got to go back to New Zealand. What am I doing here? So yeah.
Speaker 3:New Zealand's home, but I'm currently in Dubai and will be here for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1:So why did you choose Dubai, and of all places, from New Zealand to Dubai?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a lot of good reasons why we chose Dubai. I mean, I know everyone's like it's just the taxes. The taxes are, of course, a great benefit of living in Dubai, but there was quite a few other things that really were attractive for us. I don't think the taxes were enough reason to uproot our home and all that stuff, but the current state of New Zealand was just wasn't loving. It wasn't loving the vibe right now. We don't have any family in New Zealand at the moment, so my wife's mother is in Russia, my parents are in the States, so you know we're just here in New Zealand and anytime I go see family we have little kids.
Speaker 3:30 hours on the plane, three planes, two airports just brutal. And you're doing that two times a year to go visit two different grandparents. So it's four of those brutal killer flights. So I just thought, gosh, darn it, what are we doing here? Let's switch it up for a while. Let's go somewhere. Go to Dubai. The vibes there are crazy, so's, so entrepreneurial and all these kind of just cool people come in here all the time. So it's been a really good move for us.
Speaker 2:So what does that look like when you go to get citizenship in a different country like that? Does it take several months, does it take a year, or what does that look like?
Speaker 3:So Dubai doesn't give out citizenship. I mean, it's an exceptional circumstance. I think Kevin O'Leary got a citizenship here, but that was just like a gift, you know. But for most people who come here, you'll be on a residence permit. So basically the residence permit depending on which one you get will let you live here for a certain amount of time. So you can get the sort of two-year residence permit that's linked to a business that you bring over or some kind of.
Speaker 3:If you get a job here, you can get a residence permit. That way kind of if you get a job here, you can get a residence permit that way. Or you can get a golden visa, which requires an investment in either property or in government bonds, right. So you can invest in either one of those two things and you get a 10-year visa. So I think it's about $600,000 for that one. But you have to invest, right. It's not like you're just giving them money. You invest in bonds or property and if you're buying a house here or something, that gets you the golden visa, basically, and then you can live here for 10 years and get another one later on.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming then you rent there because you are just kind of there for just a certain period of time and then you'll maybe travel somewhere else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the initial commitment by me and my wife is we're going to live here for two years. So we decided okay, we're just going to rent during that time. It's too short of a time to deal with all the hassle of buying a place, fixing a place up to get it to how you want to live in, and then you're leaving. So if we stay longer and we might we might live here for much longer than two years, but the initial commitment's for two years and if we like it after two years, then we'll probably buy something here.
Speaker 2:What's the rental market like there? I mean, we're here in Maryland, as I mentioned, and we're very familiar with the rental markets in our area. What's it like over there in that type of space over there in Dubai?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's interesting. The prices are very high. You pay high rent but you also get the tax benefits. So you're definitely further ahead by paying the higher rent tax benefits. So you're definitely further ahead by paying the higher rent. But rents are pretty high, comparable with major cities like London or New York kind of rents. But there's also a lot of great stuff available loads of beach villas and incredible apartments and stuff like that. However, when we first started looking around places, there's also a lot of just rough places with unusual stuff where landlords don't take care of it.
Speaker 3:I remember we went to see one place and this guy, the real estate agent, was just hyping it up so much like, oh, this is like one of the greatest places. You have no idea. This is going to be super hot, this place is going to go instantaneously, and so we get there. The guy hasn't even been there. It doesn't work. The key is over. The apartment is finally get in there. There's stream of water coming down and it's just like there's mold all over the place. I'm like my dude, like why are you always? You literally haven't seen the place before, so you get that here too, Right, but there's a lot of great places here and we've got ourselves a beautiful villa, you know, right on the beach and stuff, so it's a very cool spot.
Speaker 1:Nice. So what do you? So I see on your profile here that you're into the crypto space, right? So I see on your profile here that you're into the crypto space, right? What exactly do you do to make money in the crypto space?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So obviously there's the investing side of things, right. Investing in crypto at the right time can make a heck of a lot of money, obviously. But it's also business, right. The whole social media channels. They're a business. We provide educational content, opinion entertainment, all that kind of stuff. So that's monetized in a few different ways through affiliate marketing, but also through our own products.
Speaker 3:We have our own newsletter, thewealthmasteryio, so it's a three-time weekly newsletter that we send out. We sell paid sponsorship spots in the newsletter and paid sponsorship spots on social media as well paid sponsorships on social media as well. And we have a premium version of the newsletter, too, which sort of goes much more in depth with charts and tutorials on how to use new cryptocurrency protocols and stuff like that how to find airdrops which is kind of like free testing. You test software, basically in crypto, and sometimes you can get free money as a result of that by getting tokens from that company for testing their software. So we cover all this kind of stuff, courses and stuff as well.
Speaker 3:So it's sort of a multi-pronged approach to income generation, because different people will need different things at different times, right? Somebody who's staying up to date with the market is going to find the newsletter products more valuable. Somebody who's new to crypto completely is going to find our courses more valuable. Somebody who's relatively new to crypto and looking for a safe place to buy or trade cryptocurrencies or a safe wallet device to store their cryptocurrencies on. They'll benefit from our affiliate marketing, for example. So that's kind of the main ways in which the business makes money.
Speaker 2:Would you say that's the main way, like through education and through your YouTube channels and all the other social media platforms? Is that pretty much your bread and butter, your main source of income?
Speaker 3:That's the main source of income, without a doubt. I've got a pretty good stock portfolio, largely focused on dividend stocks that provide some nice income there as well. So I'd like to diversify out a bit more into real estate in particular. I did have some gold. I've had to sell that recently to pay a tax bill, but I'll probably get some more, a little bit of metals in the future. I mean, gold's kind of boring doesn't do that much. You don't get any cash income or anything from it, but something psychologically I just like having a little bit of it sit around yeah, I mean, the grass isn't always greener on the other side.
Speaker 2:The real estate is great, but it seems like what you have going on. I checked your profile earlier. It looks like you have about 610,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is very impressive, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions in regards to that. Like, at what point did it kind of just take off? You know cause? Obviously, to build a channel like that doesn't happen overnight. It looks like your first video was maybe seven years ago on YouTube.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the first video, I think, was posted in July 2017. And look, it's a grind. It's been a grind and it's a very tough business to build in, because crypto is very limited attention focused from the broader public. There's always new people coming in, no matter what's going on in the market, right, but the reality is is that you spend about three years with everybody thinking that crypto is dead. Crypto is a giant scam. Nobody wants to hear anything about it, nobody wants to invest in it, which is, ironically, the absolute best time to be taking notice and investing in crypto. But people don't want to do it then. They only want to do it when it's consensus that crypto is hot again. So you have about one year during which you'll have most of your growth, most of your newsletter subscribers, most of your new subs on Twitter or on YouTube or wherever else they're coming in. So it's a very interesting business to build in.
Speaker 3:But I think the first cycle I went from about zero to 50,000 subscribers. Then, in 2021, so it was 2017, we went for about probably by the end of the bear market. There is up to about nearly 100,000 subscribers, and so it went from 100,000 to probably 400, some thousand, and then, over the last sort of year and a half or so probably, I've had another 100, 120,000. But in the last month we've added 20,000, right, so people are paying attention again. People are pouring back into the market because the prices are going up. I like to make the joke that the the best thing in crypto, the best technology in crypto, is number go up technology, and that's the thing people love the most. When the when the number is going up, the tech's great. When the number is going down, the tech sucks interesting.
Speaker 1:So did you hit um before you started all this? Did you hit one of the coins big, like in the beginning phases, is that you know? Did you like amass like we know a couple people that have amassed, like you know a bunch of Bitcoins, and then it went up. Is that something that happened to you at some point?
Speaker 3:investing in 2017. That was actually part of the content I started doing, and I never really set out to become a big content creator in the cryptocurrency space. That sort of came a little bit later on, but I basically started out by just investing. I bought some bitcoin, I bought a few of the different alt coins and then I kind of said, well, now, what? Now I'm going to start doing other stuff and trying to find out what's going on in the space and learn more. And I was so excited and just obsessed with crypto in the first few months I'd just be up till three in the morning just buzzing like, oh my gosh, I've got to do this and this and that and the other thing. And so I started really diving in and creating content. And most of the content I was creating was my own journey of finding out about stuff. Ok, what is Bitcoin mining? Ok, well, I've educated myself on that. Now I've read a bunch of stuff on it. Great, now let's make a video. And then you make that video and somebody asks well, lark, what about this thing? Okay, that's a great idea. I have no idea, but let's go find the answer for that. And that's kind of how the content creation journey started off by doing that kind.
Speaker 3:Gotcha, did you do Bitcoin mining yourself as well? No, I never actually did Bitcoin mining. I did, but not at home. So I did a bit of Bitcoin mining but outsourced, which is not a great business decision for you know, not a great financial decision to throw any money into, because the only ones who really win from that are the companies renting out the space. Right, you're much better off just buying the Bitcoin at the end of the day versus paying somebody else to mine it for you.
Speaker 3:But I did buy a Litecoin miner, but I was living in a very small apartment at the time. And so I get this machine from China and it's this big, giant, heavy, you know, 30 pound computer or whatever, just a box for mining crypto coins and I get it. I'm like, yeah, it's awesome, awesome and at the time that thing would have been making about two or three hundred dollars a day or something like that. But I live in a small apartment. These things are super loud and I didn't know that beforehand. So I got it, I plug it in and it's just like incredibly loud, like somebody's like running a saw in the room like all the time, and it's also. They also generate crazy amounts of heat, so it's just blasting out heat and it's super loud. So I had it on for like 30 minutes, like there is no way this is gonna work. So I just had to sell it, unfortunately.
Speaker 3:But, um, yeah, I never really got into the uh, the mining side of the business, and now mining is just such a crazy business anyway because largely it's become an industrial game. It it's dudes with warehouses full of machines. That's not to say that you can't make it as a home miner. You can and people do, but you have to have really, really cheap energy to make it even vaguely sensible.
Speaker 1:Right, so people with solar and different sources of energy that's not paying the grid probably makes more sense than somebody at their house that has to pay an electric bill.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, I think, to give you some kind of idea, a lot of the Bitcoin miners. They're getting their power for like two cents per kilowatt hour or something like that, or two and a half cents or three cents, and most people in most places do not get energy anywhere near that cheap. So you can't really compete with those guys who are. They get the newest machines, they order them in bulk, they get giant discounts. So it's a very, very competitive game because there's so much money to be made. You can make it as a home miner. There are people that do. I know some guys that do, but they're few and far between, especially these days. But long gone are the days when you can just pull out your laptop or run it on your home PC and mine some Bitcoin. There are other coins that can be mined, but it's not really very popular to do this sort of smaller altcoin mining anymore. It kind of died off in 2017, 2018.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what do you think about this cycle? Are we getting to the top of the market? Do you think it's still got room to grow? I mean, we saw Bitcoin go up over 100,000. I don't know where it's at right now, but what do you think about that with the market?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. I think right now the market's at a very fascinating phase. We're basically entering a major markup phase of the cycle. Now how long that lasts for is anybody's guess. It could be three months, could be six months, could be a year and complete the sort of four year cycle that we have seen previously in cryptocurrency cycles. Will that happen? I guess we'll find out, but right now Bitcoin's breaking out in a major way, but the vast majority of the rest of the cryptocurrencies aren't.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's some exceptions of coins that have gone and just made crazy new highs and stuff like that, but the majority of the coins have had some nice runs recently, but most of them have not yet hit their all-time highs, so they're still under it. You know big names like XRP had a 500% rally over the last six weeks, but it's still 40% or so under its previous all-time high, so it still has some room to go in order to hit that level right. So when this starts happening, we start seeing more of these big cap altcoins starting to take off. That's when things really turn around for the crypto altcoin markets and they'll really start to move in a much more aggressive way. My guess is that this cycle, like previous cycles, you'll see a lot of the coins making what I like to call the Burj Khalifa pattern, where they just go straight up basically for a few months.
Speaker 3:There's this sort of final massive rally where gargantuan amounts of retail investors come in and buy high and then inevitably sell low. It's a pretty brutal game, but unfortunately, most people only want to pay attention to most assets when they're worth a lot of money. They don't like buying things when they're cheap and they're non-consensus. That's the unfortunate reality thing. Quick question for you guys Do you guys own any Bitcoin?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a little bit. I've been buying it like 100 bucks a week for the last several years Nice but I don't really pay attention to it. It just sits there and I just Real estate's our game. I have assets. I have a bunch of NVIDIA shares that I sell calls on every week and I do a couple of things in the market, but for the most part, we're pretty heavy invested into rental properties and actively flipping homes. That's where most of our so it's interesting to talk to somebody on the other side of the coin that does most of their stuff in crypto space, and that's something that I haven't really learned enough about to talk about, I guess.
Speaker 3:I really like your approach because, to be honest, a lot of people I think are in your situation where they're interested in crypto but they just don't have a lot of time to deal with it. It's insane the amount of stuff going on in the cryptocurrency space right now. It goes. It's insane the amount of stuff going on in the cryptocurrency space right now. It goes so deep and there's so many niches and sub niches and you can do crypto full time and I still feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose every day and there's so much new stuff going on. But here's the thing If you're just a casual investor and you, you've heard about Bitcoin, you've learned about Bitcoin, you know it's cool, you want to have a bit of that. Your approach is actually a fantastic approach because it's not your main game, but you recognize the value and so you're just putting a little bit of Bitcoin every week, a little bit of money into Bitcoin every week, not really thinking about it, automating the process, Just having exposure to Bitcoin for the casual investors probably all you need Maybe Ethereum, maybe Solana, if you really want to go off on the limb for the again, we're talking about the average investor here who just you don't want to spend a bunch of time learning about these from blockchains and all that stuff, but you just want to have sort of exposure to the cryptocurrency asset class, Just buying some Bitcoin and dollar cost averaging in. That's a pretty simple method for winning, especially if you can take a long-term view, which, because you guys are property investors investors you understand what long-term investing is about and that you can hold an asset for five or 10 or longer years, Whereas most people in crypto there's definitely, when the markets get moving, a large amount of people who come in and want to get rich quick.
Speaker 3:They want to be the guy who buys that new dog coin for five bucks and that turns into a million bucks. But most people don't do that. Most people are just gambling and they lose all their money gambling. In fact, the odds are much worse than going to a casino. There is a website called pumpfun, which is not actually that much fun. It's more like a retail slaughterhouse where people can launch meme coins and they launch all kinds of meme coins every day Thousands, tens of thousands, some days.
Speaker 3:New meme coins. Most of them don't make it more than a few minutes or a few hours and they've done the statistics on it. It's something like 95% of the people who have used that website lose money. About 4% break even or make a very tiny profit, and about 1%, which are probably mostly insiders and highly advanced traders using sniping bots and stuff like this, actually made big money. So, yeah, just staying in Bitcoin. It's the safe, it's simple and it's the one crypto that. If I had to buy any crypto and hold it for 10 years, it would obviously be Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:So, other than just buying and holding any type of cryptocurrency for the long term, is there any other strategies, like day trading or any other ways to leverage money that someone would have into any cryptocurrency? 100%.
Speaker 3:But it's all depending on your risk-adjusted returns, right? What kind of money are you willing to risk? What kind of time do you have to dedicate to that? Day trading sounds like a fantastic idea until you realize that it takes a lot of skill, it takes a lot of determination, it takes a lot of emotional control and that most people lose most of their money doing that. Sounds like a great idea, but you know, if you're somebody who doesn't have a lot of time to devote to that, there's a lot of traders that I know and they make a lot of money, but that's their full time deal. It's what they do. They're not kind of dabbling for a half hour after putting the kids to sleep or something like that. No, this is what they do full-time and it becomes a game of odds. Right, they win 55% of the time and lose 45% of the time, but it's enough to make good money. So it's its own sort of skill and there's a lot of things to do in crypto when it comes to different strategies and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:The temptation, of course, for Bitcoin I was having this conversation with some guys the other day is OK, well, bitcoin, what else can I do? I see these big gains happening in crypto. The compound annual growth rate for Bitcoin has been crazy. It's something like 30%, 40% I don't remember the exact number off the top of my head, but it's like 40 percent a year or something like that on average, or if not higher. I can't remember the exact number, but it's a shockingly big number. So you don't actually need to be doing much more than just buying and holding the Bitcoin.
Speaker 3:Now. If you again, if you want to go off and OK, you want to find some hot altcoin or something like that Great, there's a lot of opportunities out there and if you have a little bit more time to dedicate to the space, then you can actually make much bigger returns than holding Bitcoin. The problem is you're taking more risks to do it. Now, some of those risks are relatively small. If you're going to go and buy some different altcoins like Sui or the Aptos blockchain or Avalanche blockchain, like these are pretty top coins, they're all in the top 20. Like they're not going to rug pull or something like this and chances are, if Bitcoin can move for the rest of the cycle from here to about $200,000 or $250,000, which is kind of where I've been looking at potential cycle top for Bitcoin, then that's only 100% move, or maybe 130, 140% depending on the price when people watch this. That's great, that's huge.
Speaker 3:Those altcoins I just mentioned they're probably going to have a 3 to 5x outperformance versus Bitcoin during that time. So there is a lot more money to be made. If you start going a little further down the risk scale there and some of that is you're taking more risk, but you're not really taking that much more risk. And that's the interesting thing to consider when you're looking at some of these altcoin things is that some of the bigger ones it is more risk 100%. These networks are far from certain. A lot of this stuff is here's the crazy thing. A lot of these things are basically being tested in the wild.
Speaker 1:And we do see things break so there's things that I've been hearing in the news like certain things are getting regulated, like XRP. They're saying that that could become some country's currency. Essentially, is that stuff you know? Is that true or is it? You know, like the XRP is the one that I hear the most about recently, I feel like that could be like the next one to take off. What's your opinion on that one?
Speaker 3:XRP has had a huge rally recently. Look, there's been some really crazy stuff going on If you haven't been watching the space very, very closely recently. The new Trump administration they're going hardcore into crypto. I mean, trump himself has launched a decentralized finance protocol. They've been buying cryptocurrency altcoins over the last week or so things like Chainlink and the Aave protocol. Trump's teams are buying that stuff. Trump owns Ethereum. He's brought in a crypto and AI czar David Sachs. He's coming on. The new SEC head is a very pro-crypto person, so we're going to see a lot more pro-crypto regulation. So right now, we have Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, but we also have ETF applications for XRP, solana and Litecoin right now, which, when the new guy gets in, that will probably be all approved.
Speaker 3:The United States is talking about a potential strategic Bitcoin reserve, which whether or not they just keep the Bitcoin they have right now and commit to hold on to it, or they actually start buying Bitcoin, either way, it's absolutely massive. Brazil's introduced a bill into Congress to make a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We have a lot of other countries starting to talk about it now, from Argentina to Japan and Russia and beyond. So big things are happening on the geopolitical scene with Bitcoin that have never really happened to this kind of extent before. It's a level of adoption that people have been talking about for the last decade and it's finally starting to happen Now, when it comes to the adoption of certain altcoins, we're also seeing the biggest adoption for altcoins ever. The fundamentals of crypto have literally never been better than they are right now. So with XRP, they're launching they have just been approved for. I think it might actually be launching tomorrow or the day after the RLUSD stablecoin, so the Ripple Labs US dollar stablecoin.
Speaker 3:Now here's the thing A lot of people that are sort of not more deep in the crypto space may not know One of the killer applications for crypto has been dollar-denominated stablecoins. So a stablecoin is a digital token that represents $1. It can be divided into tiny little pieces, of course, but it represents one dollar. Those have done trillions of dollar trillions a year in volume. They are some of the top 20 buyers of us. Debt like these guys are absolutely massive, and the stable coin use case has been very, very clear. Not only is, of course, used for people just to go and buy dog coins, but people are using it for cross-border transfers. Increasingly. People are using it for escaping capital controls in places like China, and on and on go the use cases. Now Ripple Labs has created the RLUSD stablecoin.
Speaker 3:Ripple Labs are the guys who work on the XRP ledger.
Speaker 3:Who work on the XRP ledger so that RLUSD stablecoin, if it becomes successful, if it sees the kind of adoption that the two dominant stablecoins, usdt and USDC, have seen, which together have about $200 billion in market cap, if the RLUSD stablecoin can get those kinds of levels or more, because they are literally partnered up with some of the biggest commercial banks and central banks in the world.
Speaker 3:And, of course, trump's now again on the crypto train and he said that American made cryptocurrencies could be exempted from all capital gains tax. That's XRP, that's Cardano, a few other names there as well, stellar Lumens and a few more. That positions the XRP token to do incredibly well because if the RLUSD stablecoin becomes successful, every time they're minting new RLUSD stablecoins and transferring them, it's going to require a little bit of XRP to be used and to be burned because they have a burning mechanism. So think of it as a perpetual stock buyback mechanism that will increase the more adoption that their stablecoin gets. It's not certain that their stablecoin is going to see massive globe dominating sort of potential. But it's there and it could, and if it does, then all the things that the XRP investors have been saying for years could come true and XRP could go. If it does, then all the things that the XRP investors have been saying for years could come true and XRP could go to the moon.
Speaker 1:essentially, Interesting Good stuff. Yeah, that's really interesting. So when you say you remember talking before about the safer ones, like you're just saying, Bitcoin is kind of the creme de la creme of all the cryptos that you can own right. So, like the people that are buying slowly but surely in Bitcoin, that's the safest route that you would suggest somebody go into investing into crypto.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. If you're very time poor and you don't have time to learn about all this stuff, but you want to have a little exposure. Bitcoin's the one. Bitcoin's just digital gold. That's probably the simplest way to understand it. It's digital gold and it's in many ways, vastly superior to gold. It's got a set supply and all this stuff. But there's a lot of other great cryptocurrencies out there, especially again, even in the top 20.
Speaker 3:You're going to take a limited amount of risk with some good potential upside, and pretty soon you're going to have the ability to buy most of the stuff via ETF products. Now, not your tiny micro-cap dog coins, obviously, but you 'll probably see in the next year maybe 10 altcoin ETFs. So we already have one which is for Ethereum. So if you're just somebody who wants to have some passive exposure to the cryptocurrency market, you can buy four or five ETFs for some of the top crypto coins that could be. You buy some Bitcoin ETFs, some Ethereum ETFs, some Solana ETFs, some XRP ETFs and just take it as a sort of a basket approach.
Speaker 3:None of those cryptocurrencies are going to disappear Extremely unlikely, I guess anything's likely, anything's possible in crypto, but it's very unlikely any of those are going to go anywhere and if you're just sort of dollar cost averaging to those for the next five to 10 years, I mean crypto is only going to keep going up. Oh, there's going to be horrific bear markets and it'll all go down terribly again. But if you take that long-term sort of view on stuff, then you've got really easy exposure coming by these etf products for someone just starting out in investing in crypto, what platform would you suggest that they buy their crypto on?
Speaker 3:yeah. So if you're depending what country, of course you of course you're in, for people in the USA, cryptocom, I think, is a really good place to go. They've got a great mobile app and cool debit card and stuff like that A lot of great options. Obviously, that's buying native crypto directly. So through the app, you're buying actual Bitcoin and actual Ethereum tokens. You can just use your broker. So if you're out of what's one of the brokers TD Ameritrade and whatever kind of stuff that you guys might use Robinhood these guys offer actually Robinhood offers real crypto these days. But you can also buy the ETF products there. So that's a pretty good.
Speaker 3:If you just want Bitcoin or Ethereum currently and pretty soon a smaller basket altcoins, then that's a great place to do it. But cryptocom is great for Americans do it. But cryptocom is great for americans great people in the uk, uh, internationally, you've got a lot of great options. I like bybit personally. It's one of the biggest exchanges out there, but it's not available in the united states or the uk right now interesting and what I guess?
Speaker 1:what makes things not available in certain countries? Is it like they're just not able to be regulated yet, or they're just like? What makes it? Does it make it sketchy that it can't use it in the US but you can use it somewhere else?
Speaker 3:It's actually quite funny the US regulatory situation, because the United States has basically been waging a war on crypto for years and it's really reached its crescendo peak with the Biden administration, who is the most hostile administration ever in the history of crypto not that crypto has been around for such a long time, but they were literally trying to kill crypto. There was something called Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Now, operation Chokepoint 1.0 was when the Obama administration tried to debank the cannabis industry. Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was the Biden administration working to debank the cryptocurrency industry. So cryptocurrency founders, cryptocurrency companies, were debanked right, you couldn't get bank accounts. People were having their bank accounts taken away from them. They were trying to make it very, very difficult for people to be able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies in the United States.
Speaker 3:Plus, the SEC waged a war on cryptocurrency companies, literally suing everybody all the goody two shoes companies. They went out and sued Kraken. They went out and sued Coinbase, cryptocom Everybody's getting sued for listing illegal securities when none of the cryptocurrencies are really securities. There are a few that could be qualified as securities, but they're not really listed on any of the US-based exchanges. So at the same time, they turned a blind eye to massive fraud at companies like Celsius. In fact, they took lots of campaign money from sorry Celsius, massive fraud at FTX as well and they took massive campaign contributions from the FTX guys. So there was a lot of dirty business going on in the USA. A lot of dirty business going on in the USA and Americans. Because of the draconian overreach from the SEC in the USA, a lot of crypto companies have simply steered away from doing anything with Americans Because basically the idea is that the SEC says, well, if you've served an American customer, then we have jurisdiction and we're going to come after you anywhere in the world, and so most cryptocurrency exchanges will just completely avoid allowing Americans on, except the US-based ones like Coinbase and Kraken and Cryptocom, because they're US companies and they go down that sort of getting a license in every single state and it's a really difficult process to onboard people in every state and to deal with the SEC. And all these companies had to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars defending themselves in court against the SEC, which has basically been just going on a warpath against these companies for no good reason other than to try to just drag them down in lawfare, which has been crazy.
Speaker 3:So even stuff like airdrops. We mentioned the airdrop thing a few minutes ago. You can go and test software and crypto and if you're an early tester, you know these networks need early tests and people will come in and try things and see what breaks, see what doesn't break, etc. If you come in and test some of this crypto in the early days, you can get an airdrop. So when they actually launch their mainnet go beyond their testnet and launch their mainnet they'll say hey, all you guys who helped us out during the testnet, here are some free coins, thanks for your help. Americans can't get that because nobody wants to give Americans free coins, because they're too scared that the SEC is going to come after them. So that's been.
Speaker 3:The biggest problem of why things are available in some places and not others is that regulators have been trying to basically kill crypto, particularly in the United States. The UK and a few other jurisdictions have been pretty rough too. China's been really bad on crypto, but some jurisdictions have gone the complete opposite direction, like Singapore, the UAE, france, going very much into saying yes, we want crypto companies to come and base their operations here. We want to pass regulations that say you can help up a bank account, you can launch your tokens here, and we're going to give you the framework to do that.
Speaker 1:So would you say, like you have an American passport, I assume.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:No, you don't. Okay. So you were born in the United States, but you gave up your US passport. That's right. If I moved with a US passport to Dubai, for example, would I be able to use those exchanges and skirt those things? Not skirt, but be able to participate, even though my passport says I'm a United States citizen?
Speaker 3:Probably not. In a lot of cases you're going to be excluded from those things because of that US passport. I mean, there might be some situations where you'll get, like, a local driver's license or something and then you've I don't know. Some exchanges will say oh, it's plausible deniability. You just gave us a driver's license from Australia, so maybe you're Australian. We didn't check passports because we don't need to check passports. There's those situations. But the crazy thing, of course, is because you're American, if you were to move anywhere, that's not America. You know you get taxed globally on your income, which is insanity. So if you come to Dubai, there's not many Americans in Dubai actually, because you come here as an American and Uncle Sam he wants your money. No matter where you go in the world, if you're making money, uncle Sam wants to put his hand in your pocket, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:And that'll come back to the US, the tax money that you're referring to. That's right.
Speaker 3:That's right. That is pretty crazy. There's a lot of dual tax agreements. So let's say you live in France where the taxes are higher than the USA, then it cancels it out. You've already paid your higher taxes, so America doesn't want anything. But if you live in somewhere with lower taxes, america is going to want whatever the difference is. And there are some, of course, no income tax countries, and there are some countries that have minimal taxes compared to the United States, like Singapore has lower taxes than the United States. Hong Kong has lower taxes than the United States.
Speaker 1:So if you're living there you have to pay, whatever the difference is back to America.
Speaker 2:Wow. So was that your strategy behind giving up your US passport, or was that done at a younger age when you moved to New Zealand?
Speaker 3:So it was definitely. The tax situation was definitely a part of it. There's a variety of different reasons why to give up a US passport. The tax thing is pretty annoying American citizens. It's interesting when you try to get a bank account abroad as a US citizen because it's this whole like. It's like these warning bells go off for any bank, even like New Zealand or something like that, and suddenly you've got to go through all this extra paperwork and do all this extra stuff and you know it just didn't seem as a New Zealand citizen, it just didn't really seem like a great thing to be holding on to anymore.
Speaker 3:I didn't really need it, it wasn't really useful. I wasn't adding much to my life at the stage that I gave up the passport and the citizenship. So, yeah, no regrets about doing that by any means. New Zealand passport's a fantastic passport and they you know it's ironic, you know you think of the US oh, so much freedom as an American passport holder Like no, where's your freedom? They chase you everywhere in the world for your tax money. Is that freedom? It doesn't sound like freedom to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it doesn't for sure. So as soon as you gave up your US passport was it just the transition from getting the new zealand passport? Is is when you gave that up, because I guess you can't actively have two at the same time oh, you can have lots of passports you can have.
Speaker 3:You can have half a dozen passports if you want. My wife's got three, I've got two, so you know it's. Uh, we bought, um, we bought grenada passports, which was an interesting experience. My brother went to school there, which is was funny.
Speaker 1:In Grenada, nice.
Speaker 3:I've never actually been to Grenada. We should go someday Just to say, hey, we came, we came, we got the passports, we came. But we start to realize how just silly the whole damn system is. You can literally go out and buy passports if you have enough money. You know just the it's a crazy world to live in and when you start to see how just broken the system is in so many ways, you just start to stop taking it all so seriously.
Speaker 2:So what's the process of getting rid of it? Then, when you got rid of the US passport, what was that? Sure, sure.
Speaker 3:So there's a renunciation process. You have to go and book into the embassy and then you have to go in and actually show up, renounce, sign a paper, make a declaration saying that you're renouncing your citizenship. They then take that and they have to check it and confirm it and actually accept your renunciation request and then from there on out, that's basically it. You're not a citizen anymore, you don't have passports or any of that kind of stuff, so it's relatively pain-free. They do charge you to leave. By the way, there's a fee you have to pay to renounce your citizenship and there is a potential exit tax over a certain amount of unrealized capital gains. They will take about 28% of that as the exit tax fee as well.
Speaker 3:So they pull at every stop to try and get that money out of your pocket.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I bet. Wow, look, I don't have any more questions for you. I know we have to get on another episode in a couple minutes. You got anything to plug on for you where people can find you and what kind of stuff that you're doing on YouTube? All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:I just want to say it's been a really cool conversation. We went to all kinds of interesting places with this conversation, so I really enjoyed talking to you guys. If anyone wants to follow along, come find me over on X, probably, where I do a lot of this stuff, or on YouTube, just Lark Davis, make sure it's the verified account. Or come check out our newsletter at thewealthmasteryio. It's free. You just get all kinds of crypto info straight to your inbox.
Speaker 2:I have one more question before you go quickly. I know you mentioned earlier that you know you would like to get started investing in real estate. Is there any areas that you had in mind that you wanted to potentially invest in real estate in?
Speaker 3:In terms of like geographically or just kind of real estate. So I was thinking it's both yeah. So I was probably going to invest largely back in New Zealand, actually just because that's my home country, right, I may not go back there for quite a while, but I like the idea of just having a bunch of property back in New Zealand and probably just residential stuff, looking at like new builds, things that probably won't need too much maintenance for the first 10 years or so. That's kind of the general thought process right now.
Speaker 1:I have. It's funny you say that because we've had somebody from New Zealand on the podcast who just recently flew here to buy real estate with me here from New Zealand and she does a lot of real estate investing over there. She does a lot of like, um, a class boutique hotels and Airbnb style um property stuff over there. So I'll have to link you guys in an email because she's from New Zealand that she actively does that she's starting to buy a couple here. Uh, she's trying to buy a couple here, um, but yeah, I'll definitely have to make that connection.
Speaker 3:U S T U S a. Real estate laws are very favorable. New Zealand's got a lot of favorable laws too. There's no capital gains tax on the sale of the property after a five-year period and stuff like that, and interest paid on mortgages is now tax deductible Again. The previous government took it away, this government brought it back. So there's some certain things, but I think the depreciation in the United States they took away depreciation in New Zealand for residential real estate and I think they've taken it away for commercial real estate as well. So that makes a big difference, I think, to the bottom numbers that you get. So I can see why Kiwi investors would be coming and looking at US markets for some property investments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely All right, Lark, we'll be in touch. I'll definitely link you guys up in an email. We'll talk when this video gets released. Awesome, thank you so much, yes.
Speaker 3:Thanks for coming on.
