Garret (00:05.26)

Lark, welcome to the podcast.

Lark Davis (00:07.373)

Thanks for having me, excited to talk to you.

Garret (00:09.666)

Yeah. So you're in Dubai and I'm here in Winnipeg, Canada and looking out the window here. is snowing. Tell me how you, you know, before we get into the whole intro thing, tell me why you're in Dubai.

Lark Davis (00:23.645)

I felt like the right decision for me and the family at this stage in life for a variety of reasons. And obviously it's just the taxes. OK, the taxes are a great bonus. Going to it that out there. But it's not enough to pick up life and go somewhere else. Right. It's it. There's a lot of reasons. We didn't have any family back in New Zealand. So that was one thing that's really weighing pretty heavily on us. Our families in Russia or the United States. And so we didn't want to really go live in Russia or the United States particularly. So let's go somewhere in the middle. Where can we go? OK, where's good for.

My business wears good for life and safety and schools and all this kind of stuff. So after a lot of having an eye and going back and forth and visiting a few different places, we decided, yeah, Dubai's kind of got everything that we're looking for. Great family vibes, cool entrepreneur vibes. So yeah, it's been a pretty cool move so far. really like it. The weather's great. Except for summer.

Garret (00:53.25)

Okay.

Garret (01:13.326)

Yeah, no, I have some friends in Dubai and New Zealand and Australia. So I don't know why I'm out here in Canada freezing my, you know what off, but anyhow, let's do the podcast thing. Why don't you give your intro to the audience so we can see who you are.

Lark Davis (01:30.544)

Sure, so I'm Lark. I'm a cryptocurrency Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur. So we've got our YouTube channel. We've got our X account. We're posting regular insights, news, updates on the markets, educational content. We have a newsletter as well about 150,000 subscribers. So we're just pumping out all kinds of content all the time, trying to get people up to speed.

educate people on the cryptocurrency market because actually learning crypto is hard and it's a big learning curve and we try to make that learning curve a little bit easier.

Garret (02:02.188)

Okay, and then backing up before crypto, what did you do?

Lark Davis (02:07.587)

So before crypto, was an English teacher. So I was teaching English and enjoyed that. I liked being a teacher. Being a teacher was fun. I was a teaching assistant at university and then went off to be an English teacher. And it was fun. I liked doing that. I liked talking to students. And it was just a neat way to be living life for a little while. But one of the things I realized while doing that, I that for about two and a half years or something like that.

One of the things I learned while doing that is that if I ever want to get ahead, I'm going to have to do something different in life, right? It was fun. Enjoyed it was a good job to do in my mid twenties. as I admit, mid twenties into early thirties, guess. Gosh darn anyway. But, well I've been doing the crypto thing for eight years now, so I did certain this was 31. So I guess I did about 28 to 31 teach in English, but any of the size point, it was a good job. I liked it, but it was kind of job where you just, there's not a lot.

Garret (02:50.04)

Ha

Lark Davis (03:04.107)

of places to go with it. You you get, you keep getting more degrees and more certifications to make a few more dollars an hour. And don't know. I wanted to, do something more interesting. And I sort of stumbled into crypto content creation. And I just loved the cryptocurrency market. As soon as I started diving really into crypto and what it was, I would just hook this. I guess crypto is awesome. This is like the thing that's going to happen. And

I didn't necessarily start crypto content creation to make it into a big business like it is today at more start as a hobby and a fun thing, but then it really grew into something big and I quit the day job and went full-time crypto in November, 2017 and haven't looked back since one of the best deserved made my life after marrying my wife.

Garret (03:46.798)

Well, sounds like you are using your education and your background and your passion for teaching and kind of marrying those two things together.

Lark Davis (03:59.043)

Yeah, I mean, definitely being a teacher helped, right? I was used to talking in front of people all the time, talking in front of classrooms, educating people. And it was interesting kind of how I started out even creating content because I started making content just on my journey, right? Even just back in the day, buying your first piece of Bitcoin in 2017 was still pretty hard for a lot of people in a lot of places in New Zealand. It wasn't easy to get the first piece of Bitcoin. So it took a while. Just that journey, start documenting that journey.

learning about stuff. Okay, hey, I'm learning about mining this week. And what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about cryptocurrency mining and how that works and make some content around that. And then people would ask questions. say, Hey, like, what about this? You know, what's, what's up with quantum computing and crypto, which was a conversation that freaked people out in the market yesterday, by the way, but still what you're talking about back in 2017. And so I'd make, I don't know, that's a great question. I'm going make a video on that and kind of stay one step ahead of the students. Right. So it was fun.

Garret (04:54.958)

So you started out, imagine, I'm guessing as a crypto investor.

Lark Davis (04:59.451)

Yeah, yep. Started off with Bitcoin. First, that was the first cryptocurrency I ever bought. Had to buy Bitcoin first. Then once you get Bitcoin, you kind of go, well, now what? Right? So then you buy other cryptocurrencies. So I bought some XRP, something called Digibyte, which I think anybody really talks about anymore, and one called NEM, which I don't think anybody really talks about anymore either. Those are my first three cryptocurrencies. I got my altcoins. All right. And I was very excited. And then, then what?

So I actually started posting on a social media platform, which I'm not sure anybody even uses it anymore, but it was some blockchain based social media platform where you'd post stuff over there. And if you got upvotes, particularly from whales, it would be worth money. You could actually cash out the tokens and I'd make five, 10, 20 bucks sometimes on posts. that was like an hour's work back then. So I was pretty excited. And that kind of kicked off the...

monetization of creating content idea in my brain and started making videos on YouTube, posting over there, the YouTube channel started getting more traction and everything sort of grew out of that sort of organically, not me showing up and say, okay, I'm to make a cryptocurrency YouTube channel and make a big business out of it. Just kind of started as a hobby and then grew into something more.

Garret (06:15.758)

Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm a content creator too, in the real estate space. And I think what, from what I've seen, the one, the content creator, some can do it to say, hey, this is what I'm gonna do. Here's my pathway. But I find the organic content is, I don't wanna say more authentic because the other ones are authentic, but your journey and probably looking back and seeing some of those, what you probably now go just awful videos compared to how polished you are now.

Lark Davis (06:31.907)

is I don't want to say more authentic because the other ones are authentic, but your journey and probably looking back and seeing some of those would probably now go just off the videos compared to how polished you are now. That's just part of the journey of a content creator.

Garret (06:44.994)

That's just part of the journey of a content creator.

Lark Davis (06:48.179)

Absolutely. You know, it's interesting because in 2018 was a terrible bear market in crypto and there was that sort of reckoning. Well, gosh, was this really right decision? I've already quit my day job and we're going all in here. And I said, no, this is this is going to be big. Crypto is not going to go anywhere. But the views went away big time in 2018. You know, I went from getting sort of averages of 10, 20, 30 thousand views per video at the height of the craziness back down to a thousand.

views per video, 2000 views per video. So it actually gave me a lot of great time to experiment with different video formats. And I just tried all kinds of different stuff and ended up with this, the talking head. It's the simplest thing. It's the easiest thing. And it's what I enjoy doing the most. You we had, we had green screens, we were doing comedy skits, like all kinds of stuff. was, it was a good time, but it was, you know, more than is necessary. So I found out what content worked and it is a journey doing that.

Garret (07:46.936)

So when you say talking head stuff, you talking just like video podcasts, stuff like we're doing right now, or just turning on the camera and teaching.

Lark Davis (07:54.285)

Just turning on the camera and talking, know, I've got two, two, maybe three different kinds of videos we'll do. One is sort of just this, I'll have a script we've researched on a topic, whether that be some kind of charts or analysis or a review on a cryptocurrency or sort of like cryptocurrency education stuff, that's this. And so it's more, a little more polished talking straight screen, reading the script. So we make sure we get all the information out to people and the others.

a much more casual format of just me, I've got some charts, I've got some tweets, some news, stuff like that. We just share that and it's much more mellow kind of content form.

Garret (08:35.864)

What do you, what's just out of curiosity, what gets the better engagement out of those two?

Lark Davis (08:40.931)

Really depends. I would say in terms of effort put in and investment put in in terms of script writing research, editing all that kind of stuff, the more casual videos definitely come out on top as sort of being more economically sensible and I think generally more poignant because they're news videos and people tend to like them more. That being said, when we get a really good long form scripted video, they can really hit super well, way better than the news videos we'll ever hit. We got one that got 200,000 views.

Last week or the week before, that was scripted good video with lots of good editing and inserting interviews and all that kind of stuff. That was really solid. And you can't really do that with just a casual sort of news video, right? So it's kind of, you've got the core community of people who show up for the casual news video and you have sort of a broader reach when you do those more polished videos.

Garret (09:32.162)

Yeah, no, I, again, real estate content. is much, much, I don't think people realize when even just it looks casual, but then when you've got at least bullet points because you're teaching, you don't want to like for me, you're leaving out something about rent control or how to evict a tenant. You don't want to leave out 0.4 and five. That is so important. You can't really do that off the cuff. No, let's get into it a little bit, but.

Lark Davis (09:52.715)

Yeah.

Lark Davis (09:57.411)

Let's get into it a little bit, I think because myself as well as probably the average listener is just crypto.

Garret (10:00.566)

I think because myself as well as probably the average listener is just like, crypto. And now they read, you know, we were just discussing in the green room about Bitcoin going over at least at the time of the recording of here over a hundred thousand. Can you really like dumb it down, make it like layman's terms, what crypto is, and then we'll dive into wherever the conversation takes us.

Lark Davis (10:27.469)

Sure, crypto at its base, right? Bitcoin is the first. We have lots of other cryptocurrencies that have come since then with all kinds of novel ideas for applications and all sorts of stuff. But essentially, cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, it boils down to this. It's the value layer of the internet, right? So we have the internet as it is, web too, as we like to call it. So that's your Facebook and all this kind of stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on, but there's not a lot of value to transact.

Whereas cryptos come in and it's built the value layer of the internet. So if you want to send money across the internet in a peer to peer fashion, not having to use a banking app or something like that, crypto is there for that. If you want to do peer to peer investments for Bitcoin or meme coins or whatever else, crypto is there for that. And the use cases expand out exponentially, borrowing and lending markets without middlemen, just smart contracts, code, software.

So this is where crypto comes in as a value layer for not just transacting, but for also proving who has what. We have stuff like NFT technology that gives verifiable digital ownership of assets, whether it be a silly monkey picture or a piece of real estate or a bond that can all be represented on chain, again, with verifiable proof of who has what. So really powerful technology and obviously,

the power of cryptocurrency is getting a lot of recognition, particularly in 2024, because BlackRock has come in in a major way. Now, this, think, was one of the biggest social-proofing events ever for crypto. If you ever had any doubts of whether Bitcoin is a serious asset or whether blockchain technology and cryptocurrency assets have any real value in the world, the world's biggest asset manager, and Larry Fink, the most powerful man in the world, well, one of them, let's say, one of the 10, maybe, he...

is big on Bitcoin and he is big on the tokenization of assets, whether it be talk about real estate, commodities, securities, bonds, whatever it might be, that's all gonna come onto the blockchain because it reduces friction. you've ever, here's a great example. If you've ever sent an international bank transfer, you know what a nightmare that can be. It takes days, days to get from point A to point B.

Lark Davis (12:45.781)

And often there's middleman banks that take extra fees. Sometimes they'll stop your transaction. They're not even going to tell you for a week or two. And then a week or two later, you get a phone call. Hey, why are you sending money from point A to point B? Well, because I need to pay for something. Yeah, but we're not really sure. You need to give us more evidence of why you're paying for that. This is happening multiple times. And it costs, of course, a lot of money. You're paying $10 to your bank, $10 to the middleman bank. You're paying 4X fees, all that kind of stuff. Whereas if I get

Bitcoin I can send you some Bitcoin in Just a few minutes now Bitcoin is the slowest of all the cryptocurrencies by the way It's the OG one. It's the most secure computer network in the world by the way, and it's slow on it doesn't need to be fast It's not built for speed. It's built for security so I can send you some Bitcoin It'll be with you in 10 minutes maximum of an hour depending on the fees that I pay for it which is days faster and

99 % cheaper in most cases than using the banking system. And we have new currencies that allow for that process to happen within a couple of seconds for a fraction of a penny.

Garret (13:53.634)

Okay, so I'm going to back up the bus a little bit here. Excuse me. Because I asked you to kind of...

Sorry, Zach. Yeah, no, I'm just going to get Zach to edit that out if you could, Zach. He's my video editor. Didn't think of coughing there. No. So yeah, let's let's dumb it down even more. I have a working knowledge of this only because I've had a couple of crypto people on the pod, but it's been like a year and now you're going into blockchain and NFTs and things like that. Let's just say

Lark Davis (14:07.521)

Was it not simple enough? We can break it down more.

Garret (14:34.242)

What is crypto? Why is there value? And then we'll move from there.

Lark Davis (14:38.873)

Sure, so crypto Cryptocurrency is based on blockchain technology. Okay blockchain technology is simply a verifiable immutable ledger of Transactions, so let's take bitcoins the classic example. So Bitcoin you can go back right to the start of Bitcoin

And every 10 minutes, there's been a new block of data that gets issued out. That block of data contains the transactions of who sent what where. Okay, Bob and Sally did a transaction that's recorded. Bob sends Sally one Bitcoin. Great. And in the middle, there is the software, the network of miners who are verifying the transactions to make sure nobody's cheating. And they take a little service fee, which is the transaction fee for making sure that's a valid transaction.

So at a very basic level, this blockchain technology allows for a verifiable ledger of who has what, and it allows for a permissionless way for people to send money from one person to another.

Garret (15:43.15)

Why does it have value? Like I'm gonna ask questions as if I'm pretending I'm my, know, again, I'm 53 years old. I've always invested in real estate. I'm trying to go into the avatar of our listener. 53 always invested in real estate, always e-transferred here in Canada or you know, whatever other electronic funds, but it's still real dollars in currency. Why does...

Lark Davis (15:46.721)

Sure.

53 years old. I've always invested in real estate. I'm trying to go into the avatar of our listener. 53, always invested in real estate, always retransferred here in Canada or, know, whatever.

Garret (16:09.56)

blockchain have value that you can actually trade transfer. Let's go from there.

Lark Davis (16:15.676)

Sure, there's blockchain the technology right Blockchains don't necessarily have value have a private blockchain or a valueless blockchain We talked about specific blockchains like Bitcoin. Why does Bitcoin have value? Well part of it's because people believe it has value in the same way that we have a belief system around

a dollar bill having value, right? That's just a piece of paper backed up by literally nothing from the government, but we believe it has value. So in a similar fashion, Bitcoin has people who believe it has value, but it goes much deeper than that, right? Bitcoin is also representative of a piece of essentially digital real estate of a fixed amount of a digital asset, right? So there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin, which creates a sense of scarcity.

for the asset and because people look and they understand, okay, I want the value proposition of what Bitcoin is as a unique asset within the cryptocurrency space. If enough people demand to have that asset, you run into the problem of scarcity of the asset, which of course drives the price up and people give it a value that it has, which currently is around $100,000 per Bitcoin. Now, why do people value Bitcoin? Well, there's a few interesting things. Essentially, people are looking at Bitcoin nowadays as

digital gold. So, okay, we know that gold has industrial applications, right? So there's a very specific use case for that. But a big portion of why we value gold is because gold is gold. We've all agreed that this particular yellow metal has investment value. Now, gold's not the most useful metal in the world necessarily. It's very useful. It's also not the rarest metal in the world. There's other metals that are rare and potentially make better investment vehicles.

But we have not decided that that could be the best investment vehicles. We've all decided gold, gold coins, little gold bars. This is where our investment lies. Central banks stack gold, for example. They don't stretch huge amounts of palladium or gallinium or any other kind of metals. Right. So there's that to consider as well. We've decided that certain things have value and Bitcoin has value to a huge amount of people for being a

Lark Davis (18:29.955)

permissionless asset, for being a decentralized asset, for being digital gold, the gold of the new era, essentially.

Garret (18:38.476)

Okay, now that makes sense. You mentioned 21 million Bitcoin. I'm aware of that concept. Can you explain that?

Lark Davis (18:46.275)

Sure, so the total supply of Bitcoin is set at 21 million. So it's hard-coded in, so it's guaranteed scarcity. See, as opposed to gold, they're not finding new gold deposits all the time. El Salvador just announced they found potentially a few trillion dollars worth of gold. That follows on some other recent major discoveries of gold. China, I think, found a major gold deposit recently. Uganda found a major gold deposit recently. So they're always finding new gold, right? There's lots of gold. And we haven't even started mining the oceans, right?

So there's an unknown amount of gold out there and it's got approximate average inflation rate of around 2%. Huge amounts of gold in the world. We don't know how much. Then of course we'll start mining space some point, not in our lifetimes, but you know, there's lots of gold out there. Let's just put it that way. Bitcoin by contrast is 21 million coins. That's the maximum supply. Now these coins are slowly emitted over time. Now currently we're up to about 19.5 million coins, but the...

rest of the 1.5 million are going to come over the next 120 years or so with probably 90 % of those over the next 20 years. So it's a very slow process over time emitting out all of this Bitcoin, but there is a hard coded and again verifiable total max supply, which is very attractive to a lot of investors who are looking for that store value trade.

and are essentially buying Bitcoin as a gold alternative, but an undervalued one, one that has not yet reached a market cap similar to gold.

Garret (20:21.496)

Right, and to your point, if we talk about paper money and a country that simply says, well, we don't have enough money, we're just gonna print more. I mean, that just, it devalues the currency and that's not what an investor wants, right? That's what some countries do and it kills their economy, inflation, all those types of things.

Lark Davis (20:34.051)

Mm-hmm.

Lark Davis (20:42.815)

Mm-hmm, and you can never print more Bitcoin. That's the thing.

Garret (20:46.55)

Okay. And then speak to me about mining just in a, very general sense. I know there's Bitcoin miners. How does somebody mine for Bitcoin and why does it work?

Lark Davis (20:57.731)

So mining Bitcoin, essentially there are tens of thousands of computers around the world. Now Bitcoin mining has become a pretty industrial thing at this point. You literally have warehouses full of computers that are mining Bitcoin. So every day about 450 new Bitcoin are created as rewards to the Bitcoin miners, the guys running the computers. So Bitcoin mining is the process of keeping the network wildly secure.

So have, tens of thousands of highly specified, specific application purpose-built computers that are wildly powerful, securing the Bitcoin network. They all essentially compete to be the guy who gets to claim each reward that comes out 10 minutes. Every block is set with a set reward of Bitcoin that comes into it. So in exchange for processing the transactions and recording

in that page of the ledger, who got who who Bob sent his Bitcoin to, he sent a Sally or Jane or Annie. It's all recorded there, right? But they're not actually names, they're cryptographic addresses. But that's the idea. And so they record that, and they get a reward for entering that page of the ledger into the total ledger book, essentially.

Garret (22:20.814)

Okay, I that makes sense. So the other types of crypto, you said Bitcoin's very slow. Maybe give us an overview of the different types. Maybe going back from some of the ones you said that nobody minds anymore, not that popular to what's hot right now.

Lark Davis (22:39.181)

Sure, mean, look, there's tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies that are tracked by the major tracking sites. There's tens of thousands of new ones created every single day, the vast majority of which are scams and go to zero in seconds. But here's the thing. There's a lot of big networks that have had a big impact. Ethereum is the second biggest cryptocurrency. It's what's called a smart contract platform. So Bitcoin is very basic. Digital gold, that's Bitcoin. That's the thing to understand about it. Verifiable digital gold.

highly divisible, all that kind of stuff. One Bitcoin breaks down to a hundred million pieces, et cetera, right? So very, very simple idea for people to understand. Other major cryptocurrencies, whether it be Ethereum or Solana, these are called smart contract blockchains. So essentially they're a blockchain that allows for additional functionality on top of it. So they're a base layer and people build applications on top of that.

There's a lot of different applications that people build. There's stable coin applications that allow for the transfer of US dollars across the blockchain. There are borrowing and lending markets. There's video games. There's social media platforms, all this kind of stuff built on top of these blockchains. So they allow additional functionality through smart contracts, which are essentially software that allow for the creation of these different financial applications.

on top of a blockchain network and they're built on top of a blockchain network, not just on some random website somewhere because it's interoperable, it's verifiable, and it's permissionless.

Garret (24:09.262)

So when you stack some of these things on top of that cryptocurrency, kind of like it's going along for the ride, what happens to the value of that crypto? Is that what's driving the value?

Lark Davis (24:23.117)

So if you talk about, let's say, Ethereum, right? Ethereum's got the most money on it of all the blockchains. It's got 80, $90 billion of dollar stable coins on it and $100 billion worth of different assets in sort of borrowing lending platforms and stuff like that on top of Ethereum. So to an extent, yes, we see...

the more value and application, useful applications that are built on top of a blockchain, the more value that it can accrue, the more people are using it, the more demand there is for the asset. You see, to use Ethereum, for example, you need to have some of the ether token because again, in order to make sure that networks are not spammed, right? If you had free transactions on blockchain networks, the networks would simply be spammed all the time and they'd be unusable. But because there's transaction fees ranging from very, very small to...

maybe a few dollars per transaction, depending on the network that you're using. Because of that, you have to have a little bit of that asset to be able to interact with the network. So if I want to go into use an exchange on the Ethereum blockchain, so it's all decentralized, right? I download my decentralized wallet. I fund it with some Ethereum and I can go do whatever I want. can buy any assets that I want on chain using a decentralized exchange. So if you think about your

stock brokerage exchange or something like that. It's all centralized web two platform, web two logins, all this kind of stuff where instead I can go on chain on this Ethereum blockchain, log in with my cryptocurrency wallet, use my cryptocurrencies, all permissionless, just using software to swap my Ethereum for another token. But in order to do that, I have to have a little bit of money to pay to the miners to put that transaction into a block so that it's then verified, put in the immutable ledger.

and everybody can see the transaction from then on out.

Garret (26:14.872)

And who controls the immutable ledger? Like this is just when a cryptocurrency is introduced, all of these things are kind of defined and are all cryptocurrencies a static amount of coins that are available like Bitcoin? Is that basically the theory in every single crypto?

Lark Davis (26:31.661)

Sure.

No, not at all. Great question though. So we've got a lot of different ways this has been approached. Bitcoin was created by an anonymous developer, Satoshi Nakamoto. He made Bitcoin, stuck around for a couple of years, released it in the wild. hasn't heard it from for 12 years now, I think like that. And it is maintained, the code base is maintained by a group of open source developers. Okay. So people, it's like an honor to work on Bitcoin.

other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum or Solana as examples, they have foundations, those foundations own a portion of the cryptocurrency, they pay developers to make sure that there's continual upgrades going on that, you know, set new parameters for how fast it is, what the fees are, new updates to make sure that technology stays robust, all this kind of stuff. So a lot of the cryptocurrencies, bitcoins,

taken that sort of fixed supply idea, right? Others have fixed supplies as well. Some have what's called elastic supplies. So Ethereum is an example of one that has an elastic supply. So technically there's no total top for Ethereum. They could make an infinite amount of it, so to speak, but it's only got so much emissions. So many new Ethereum are created per block per day. So.

And that's offset by burning mechanisms, which are basically perpetual stock buyback mechanisms put within the blockchain that burn a certain amount of the asset every time somebody sends a transaction.

Garret (28:09.644)

Okay. So, I mean, it goes without saying that crypto has just been growing like crazy. What is the, what do you think the factors are that's increasing its popularity?

Lark Davis (28:23.341)

There's a lot of things going on. since, of course, Trump got elected, there's been basically the Trump trade going on, particularly for crypto, because there's lots of talk around bringing on Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset for the USA. Brazil's now talking about it. Russia's now talking about it. We see corporations adopting cryptocurrencies. Now 60 publicly traded companies that have Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

Microsoft was talking about it, but shot it down. Amazon apparently is going to be talking about potentially doing that as well. So we're seeing a lot of this adoption continue to happen for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin ETFs launched this year and the Bitcoin ETFs launched by BlackRock and Fidelity and some of the world's biggest asset managers. These were the most successful ETF launches of all time. Of all time. We already have $34 billion of net inflows to Bitcoin ETF products.

most successful ETF launch of all time. Absolutely mind blowing numbers coming into these ETF products. there's a lot of stuff driving Bitcoin specifically, and there's a lot of stuff driving crypto more broadly. We're seeing increased stable coin adoption. We're seeing alt coins getting ETFs. Alt coins are other currencies that are not Bitcoin. So Ethereum has got an ETF. We're going to have Solana have an ETF. BlockBull probably heard of XRP. That's going to give an ETF.

when we get a new SEC administration, we'll get some more of those things coming through the current SEC administration has been very antagonistic towards crypto. But there's a lot of things and I think it really just mostly boils down to increasing adoption for cryptocurrency technology. The number of people actually using blockchain networks on a daily or weekly or monthly basis is hitting new all time highs all the time. We're talking tens of millions of people. In total,

The most recent number I saw is around 600 to 650 million people globally own cryptocurrencies. So that's big. That's almost 10 % of the global population at that point. You got to consider, I guess a lot of people are babies, so they're not going to have crypto. So let's say about 10 % of the adult population of the world currently owns crypto, at least some small amount of it, which is big.

Garret (30:33.454)

Yeah, that's huge. That's huge.

Lark Davis (30:36.577)

And by the way, that's predicted to get to three billion by the end of the decade.

Garret (30:44.802)

What's an ETF, just so you can, know, lots of acronyms thrown around. What's an ETF just for the audience?

Lark Davis (30:50.716)

Sure. So an ETF is basically an exchange traded product. Okay. So basically if you want to go and buy one Bitcoin or a little piece of a Bitcoin, you can now go to your Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade, whatever stockbroker app you're using, and you can buy a Bitcoin ETF from BlackRock. So basically it's a piece of paper, right?

like a stock that you buy and that gets put in your account. Now you don't actually buy real Bitcoin in this situation. Blackrock or Fidelity or whoever else is issuing that particular ETF paper product for you to buy on your stockbroker app, they go and buy the actual Bitcoin for you. So if I go and buy one Blackrock Bitcoin ETF, they go and buy

the Bitcoin for me and they hold onto the Bitcoin for me. So these Bitcoin ETF products have given people a super easy way to be able to get into Bitcoin because before you had to go and you had to get an exchange account and find a way to get money over there. And then you don't really want to keep it on the exchange that might get hacked. So have to get a wallet and download your private keys. And it's a big learning curve for a lot of people who

They've heard about Bitcoin. They've got some idea. They've maybe heard a few podcasts about or something. They want to have exposure to Bitcoin. We don't want to have all the hassle of Bitcoin. That's where the ETF comes in because you can just buy it like you'd buy any other stock.

Garret (32:16.814)

but there must be fees associated with that if BlackRock is buying that for you, right?

Lark Davis (32:19.235)

Of of course, of course. think I'm not sure what the BlackRock fee is. I think it's about 0.5%. So obviously if you buy the Bitcoin directly and hold it directly, you're not paying any fees to anybody. You can just sit there for 10 years. You don't pay a single penny in fees. If you have your BlackRock Bitcoin ETF for 10 years, you're gonna pay 5 % over that 10 year period.

Garret (32:45.838)

But of course the alternative is setting up your wallet, setting up your accounts, et cetera, et cetera, getting knowledge. So yeah, I could see why investors are turning to that. You mentioned Trump administration. What other cycles or factors are driving this that we're seeing in 2024?

Lark Davis (32:50.84)

Mm-hmm.

Lark Davis (33:09.037)

Sure. So look, we've seen global adoption really taking off in a very, very serious way. It was announced that the tiny little country of Bhutan has been mining Bitcoin and have a billion dollars of the Bitcoin. And you might think, well, who cares about that? That's just some tiny little country in the middle of nowhere, not a big deal. Yeah, well, now we've got Oman, the UAE confirmed mining Bitcoin, Russia mining Bitcoin at state level stuff, right? Not just somebody in Russia doing that, like state level, actually, actors doing this.

Russia is now talking about creating a strategic reserve asset of Bitcoin. Brazil that's currently being debated in the Congress, whether they want to create a reserve asset. So put 5 % of the country's central bank funds into Bitcoin. Like these are big things happening out there. So in terms of the Bitcoin.

value proposition as a scarce asset, you're literally now at a situation where countries and major corporations and Wall Street, as well as just regular people who are the only people really buying for the past 10 years. But now we have all these new players coming in, all chasing after a scarce asset. So this is one of the big things really been pushing a lot of the excitement in the market is a lot of new buyers coming in and again, buying all this scarce digital gold. But a lot of other things too, we're seeing

sort of less exciting but very important things happen. Like so there's something called a stable coin. A stable coin is basically a digital token that lives on top of Ethereum or Solana or some other blockchain network and it represents one US dollar. Sometimes they represent other currencies. You have ones for euros, you have ones for Japanese yen and stuff like that. Let's just say dollars. So these currently have, there is must be about

Probably almost 200 billion dollars in stable coins right now. Maybe it's 190 or something like that, but a lot of money. Let's just put it that way and stable coins have been one of the absolutely killer applications for blockchain networks because it allows for you to transfer dollars from person A to person B for again fractions of a penny and almost instantaneously compared to using almost any other option. It is the best option by far.

Lark Davis (35:25.965)

So we're seeing a lot of new stable coins coming out with major banking partners sort of coming in and backing some of these things. Countries issuing their own stable coins. The UAE recently announced that they're making a stable coin version of the Emirati Dirham. So that's an official state issued stable coin coming out. I mean, things are getting pretty crazy out there and this is all driving adoption of more liquidity into the markets.

Garret (35:53.026)

Yeah. I mean, you said about a hundred years, 150 years before we reached 21 million. I mean, I can't even project what'll happen at that point when all of the bitcoins have been issued. you predict that would drive the price even higher at that point? Or is that just expected?

Lark Davis (36:12.515)

So the idea with the Bitcoin emissions over time, by the end of the century, there's only going to be about one Bitcoin left to mine. That's the thing. It's going to be 40 years mining just one final Bitcoin. The idea is that over time, the Bitcoin block rewards, in four years time, we're going to drop from 450 Bitcoin a day to 225 Bitcoin a day.

Four years after that, we drop from 250 to 125, and every four years that gets cut in half. The idea is that over time, the price of the asset will rise enough, and the network usage via fees will be what keeps the network alive, because the fees will be valuable enough to the miners to keep the network running. So far, so good on that whole theory, by the way. The early days had very, very high block rewards with thousands of Bitcoin a day being issued, because...

there weren't as many users for the blockchain. So we needed to have higher monetary incentives for people to secure the network. Now over time, again, this is all coded in at the start of Bitcoin, over time, we're seeing the total amount of new Bitcoin issue drop. Well, network stats remain good and the miners can survive more on fees and less just on block rewards.

Garret (37:28.588)

Yeah. Wow. it, it is, you know, I think what blows my mind is what you said there, Lark about state sponsored mining. So instead of these countries and I mean, pick your country, right? That is, I made the example of just printing money, right? Now they're putting the resources into state sponsored mining, which is

Lark Davis (37:29.687)

It's a big experiment. don't know how it's gonna work in 100 years, but.

Garret (37:51.434)

essentially improving their economy because now they're grabbing assets that they couldn't before. What is the world going to look like in terms of these? It's very interesting.

Lark Davis (38:02.303)

It's a crazy time to be in. know, for any, again, for any of the sort of people who are still doubting the seriousness of Bitcoin is nasty, there's a lot of other cryptocurrencies and a lot of it's very unserious stuff. But when we talk about Bitcoin specifically, literally there's half a dozen countries that are currently mining Bitcoin at a state level. Some of them are very small, Salvador and Bhutan. Some are bigger players like the UAE, Russia.

Right. The USA Trump has said he wants Bitcoin to be made in America and stuff like that. And currently there's no public, there's no private government run sort of Bitcoin mining operation. There's a lot of public companies in America that are mining Bitcoin. It's one of the biggest Bitcoin mining countries by total percentage of the Bitcoin mining power. But

The move towards strategic reserve assets of Bitcoin, I think is something that's absolutely going to be a game changing moment for the cryptocurrency market to see. already, again, see very small countries holding their Bitcoin Bhutan, El Salvador. There's been a lot of rumors running pretty hot that one of the Middle Eastern countries has been buying gargantuan amounts of Bitcoin. It has not yet been confirmed, but some very knowledgeable people with

very close ties to some very powerful people who would not put their reputation out there saying these kinds of things otherwise have basically said that right now there is a country who is front running the idea of the American strategic Bitcoin reserves. So there's been two things proposed in America. One is that they'll simply keep the Bitcoin that they have, which they have about 200,000 Bitcoin approximately they've got from various sources over time. So the U S government owns about 200,000 Bitcoin. Now, historically they just sell it off.

Right? So they slowly sell it all over time, try not to crash the price too much, cause that would work against themselves. So they sell a little bit here and there, take that money and just bank it. Right. But Trump's proposed, no, no, let's not sell that. Let's take it, put it with the fed and they're going to keep it for at least 20 years. And there's been a second proposal, which is to sell some of the American gold and America's got like way more gold than anybody else. Sell a little bit of the American gold and use that to buy a million Bitcoin. Now, if that actually passes.

Lark Davis (40:14.391)

There's no way that that can happen. And other countries are not going to have to pay more attention to what's going on with Bitcoin. You know, just imagine America is going to buy a million Bitcoin and suddenly France, Italy, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, everybody's just going to ignore it. Can't happen.

Garret (40:21.805)

Mm-hmm.

Garret (40:33.964)

No, they're not gonna let that advantage happen. How, mean, is it public, how many, owns what at this point, or is it speculation, or how do you verify that?

Lark Davis (40:46.755)

So everything is visible on chain, but there's no names there. It's all just cryptographic address. it's not like, know, Saudi shake owns this Bitcoin, know, guy in Argentina owns this, right? But sometimes on chain detectives can find these addresses. That's how we found the Bhutan address. That's how we know that Bhutan has about,

Garret (40:59.501)

Right, right.

Lark Davis (41:11.459)

a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin right now. The guys in El Salvador, the El Salvador Central Bank has been buying a Bitcoin a day for the last two years, and they've publicly posted their address so that people can track and see that, yes, they're buying one Bitcoin every single day. So you can see stuff like that. Others, it's not so clear. There's been some on-chain activity where we've seen big addresses accumulating. That's given rise to speculation that maybe the Saudis or the Qataris have been buying, but they haven't announced anything yet. Because why would they want to announce it? Because everybody else will then start.

trying to front run their buys, so do it quietly.

Garret (41:44.174)

Well, okay, so I've got a thought in my head because the strength of an economy, at least in my humble opinion, is really based on confidence, right? Confidence in the currency. So I'm from Canada right now. Our Canadian dollar is probably the worst it's ever been, right? I think it's like a $1.45 as of today, like basically one and a half times where, I don't know, a decade or two ago, were, you could probably be, there were...

the rare times when the Canadian dollar was almost at par with the US dollar. Now, a lot of that has to do with confidence, a lot of it has to do with economy and what's going on between the two countries and politics. But imagine for a second, if a country were to start mining Bitcoin and starting to have this verifiable reserve, what would that do to public perception for the value of the paper currency in your opinion?

Lark Davis (42:38.285)

Well, it depends on if there's any relationship to the paper currency. You can look at the United States, it's a great example. The United States has the world's biggest gold reserves, but it doesn't matter. It has no impact on the dollar because the dollar hasn't been backed by gold since the 1970s. The unfortunate reality of modern fiat currency is that it's backed by literally nothing and the central banks are not accountable to anyone.

They don't answer to even the politicians in any case. do whatever they want and they print as much money as they want. And they have shown that they are willing to print gargantuan sums of money whenever they want. And that has huge impacts for you as a regular person because inflation goes up and your savings get debased. You know, in my lifetime, I often give the example of my father had taken a hundred dollars and put it in an envelope when I was a kid and gave it to me now. That hundred dollars.

What's a hundred bucks worth anymore? Back then, back in the night, mid 1980s, a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks. Where'd you get one of these? Wow. Now it's like a hundred bucks. That's maybe going to buy lunch somewhere if we're lucky, you know? So that's right. So you've already lost 75 % of the purchasing power of the dollar in my lifetime. It's insane. Now contrast that of course, with Bitcoin. See, this is the thing is that even if a lot of these countries start adopting

Garret (43:43.554)

Yeah, right. Not if you have a glass of wine.

Lark Davis (44:01.943)

Bitcoin and start storing the central banks and stuff like that. It's not necessarily going to trickle down to backing the fiat currencies. It'd great if it did. great if we had gold backing or some kind of commodities backing fiat currencies. And the BRICS nations, by the way, have put forward a proposal. And it's tough because you have to get a lot of nations with competing interests to agree on this. But they put forward a proposal to have a BRICS currency, but a currency that's backed by a basket of commodities, including other countries.

currencies like Chinese Yuan, South African Ran, also oil, silver, gold, timber, stuff like this. So real stuff in that basket backing the value of that currency. So don't know when that's going to happen, but that would actually be something tangible. The problem with fiat currencies is nothing backing any of them, but

Don't wait around for your government to come save you. This is one thing that I think everybody's learned over time. Your government's not coming to save you. Your government's not going to come help you. It's probably going to be very much the opposite. But you do have the chance to save yourself. And gold investors have known that for a long time. Bitcoin investors are the gold 2.0 investors for the modern times. live in the modern internet era. I like gold. I like gold. It's cool. Big fan. But Bitcoin is gold 2.0. And you can buy it yourself. Don't wait for your government to buy it for you.

Garret (45:22.19)

Yeah, that's a great analogy. Lovely. Why don't you, I think you've demonstrated over the last hour here, the knowledge base you have, right? Like I'm suitably blown away. I'm sure listeners are just like, okay, I know what I don't know. Why don't you spend a few minutes speaking about your platform? You mentioned students. Sort of give us, I guess I'll allow you to sort of pitch if you will.

Lark Davis (45:49.155)

Thanks. Look, I just want to say it's been a really interesting conversation so far because most of the time when I'm coming to talk to people, they already have some kind of base or talking on my channel. It's all sort of people who are a little more hooked in, hooked in, hooked, no, just hooked into crypto sort of on a more regular basis. So it's actually really fun to actually kind of come back and have this conversation. It's really interesting for me. So thanks for giving me the opportunity. Look, guys, if you want to come find what we're doing.

Garret (46:04.088)

Technical.

Lark Davis (46:18.339)

Come over on X, come on YouTube, Lark Davis. Make sure you get the official accounts, by the way. We're just doing all kinds of educational content all the time, sharing the news, sharing fun memes. We're having a good time. You got to have fun. It's investing. Don't take it too seriously. Okay. But yeah, we've got a great newsletter as well. If you want to find that, it's thewealthmastery.io. It's 150,000 people a week. We're going to know all the latest updates happening in the cryptocurrency market. So we'd love to see you there.

Garret (46:44.174)

Wow, no, you're clearly the forerunner in it. And I commend you for it because it's not easy to be a leader in the content creation space. And particularly with that level of knowledge and acuity with what is an emerging technology. No, think you guys are doing amazing things and making the world a better place because of that knowledge that you're imparting.

Lark Davis (47:10.349)

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's my passion. It's great to be able to do something that I love as my job.

Garret (47:16.897)

Yeah. Second last final word here. What do you think an investor should do if they want to learn more about this other than obviously following Lark Davis in terms of what's the next thing that people should be paying attention to?

Lark Davis (47:31.619)

Sure, if you want to get invested in the cryptocurrency asset class, the first thing I would say, prices have been going pretty crazy recently, so people are feeling a lot of FOMO, you need to take a step back and just go and learn. Educate yourself. Spend. It's a new asset class. This is the thing. It's not stocks. It's not commodities. It's not bonds. It's an entire new asset class. You have to understand the mechanisms of that asset class and a bit of how it works. You're to have to spend.

10, 20 hours, read some stuff, listen to some podcasts, actually understand what it is you're investing in before you put any money in. Cause here's one thing about crypto. Crypto is a very volatile asset class. So crypto, if he looks got about a two to one beta to tech stocks on average, not all the times, not perfect, but generally if tech stocks are down 20%, Bitcoin's down 40%, something like that, approximately. And the rest of the crypto markets down more. just as an example, so you have to be used.

to that potential for massive volatility. And you're never going to have success in crypto if you're just coming in without any knowledge, because you'll see it drop five or 10 % in a day and go, my gosh, what is this? I don't understand it I'm gonna sell it. You need to actually have that understanding of what the asset is and what it is you're investing in. You wouldn't go and invest in anything else without having any knowledge. So resist the FOMO, educate yourself. And that's one of the first things I tell anybody before you buy anything.

educate yourself. And when you do go to buy something, you probably want to buy Bitcoin first, just a little bit to get a taste of what's going on in crypto. And for a lot of people out there, you're not even going to need anything else besides Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum. If you're just a casual investor, you listen to this conversation, go, wow, Bitcoin is really cool. Maybe like to have some other exposure to something else going on in crypto. If you're just a casual investor and you want to have that exposure, buy some Bitcoin.

and maybe Ethereum, you can maybe buy ETFs if you don't mind paying the fees and feel you can custody those coins yourself, do that. And that's probably it. Put one to 5 % of your portfolio in it. And these are not my numbers, by the way. These are what like Fidelity, ARK Invest, even BlackRock. These are the kind of numbers that these guys are giving out about what they think's a reasonable allocation for the average investor to have to the cryptocurrency asset class. Because reality is if you haven't had Bitcoin in your portfolio for the last eight years,

Lark Davis (49:50.083)

You've underperformed anybody who's had even 1 % of their portfolio in Bitcoin.

Garret (49:55.95)

Okay, great advice, great advice. Okay, and then the final word, I always ask this question of every guest and I'm interested to see what you have to say because you're an investor, but also the fact that you've moved your family around a little bit. So this is the Investing to Win podcast. How do you define success and what does winning look like for you?

Lark Davis (50:15.801)

I feel like I already have got both. I feel like I've really got to a great level of success in terms of my business does what I wanted to do.

We've got enough money to not have to worry in life, which is a great feeling. Yeah, I feel like very just very much filled with gratitude all the time for being able to do what I do. And I feel like I've already to an extent won the game and have got that success. So it's great. It's great. Success looks like more of this. And over time, I might pull back a little bit on like the YouTube. I feel like

because things are exciting in the market right now. I've really been going all out on YouTube and over time I might even retire from YouTube and just focus on the newsletter and stuff like that. I can take back even more of my time. Cause of course at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is your freedom, right? And I am free to do what I want to do. I choose to do what I do now. Cause I love it. I love the game. I'm addicted to the game without a doubt. But over time, the reality is, that all that stuff, making more money, adding another zero.

it reaches its limits, right? And you can still make loads of money every year and not have to work quite as hard. And there's that element too. So over time, I think I might move a little bit more of my achievement towards having a little bit more just freedom and being able to chill a bit more.

Garret (51:37.784)

Yeah, well said. Well, I mean, we do what we do to have fun and to spend time with those that matter most to us. So, Lark, thanks so much for doing this. I know that we broke it down into very, very basic conversations. My listeners and investors who are listening really appreciate it. And yeah, we're definitely all going to be checking out your content and your platform. So thanks for coming on the pod.

Lark Davis (52:01.549)

Thank you.