This week we are going to slow down a little. No technical talk! Instead I'm going to describe the biggest mistake I have made in cryptocurrency since 2014. It's easy to get swept up in a bull market but it's a good time right now to plan what you are going to do during a downturn.

I can be reached at mcintosh.fintech@gmail.com by email and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Hey, everybody. No one on this podcast is a financial advisor. And all information presented

on this podcast is for informational purposes only. And now that we have the legal stuff out

of the way, let's jump on in. Welcome to the generational wealth with cryptocurrency podcast.

I'm your host McIntosh. And today we're going to be talking about my biggest mistake. I did want

to kind of lighten things up. Well, talking about mistakes is maybe not light, but lighter on the

technical side last week was a you know, we talked about a fair amount of technical things. And some

of us may have gotten a little lost and all that. The good news is you don't have to know all those

details, although it is helpful. But this week, I wanted to talk about the biggest mistake I've made

in seven years in crypto. Now, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've made some of them repeatedly.

But there is one that I think clearly stands out as my biggest mistake. I don't regret it.

At this point, it's in the past and there's nothing I can do about it. And I choose to

not live in regret. But I would like to share it with you in hopes that it will keep some of

you from making this same mistake, because it's an easy thing to do. Now, to set the stage for this,

you have to understand it's 2017. The bull market is in full roar. Things are off the charts very

similar, by the way, to what's going on right now. A lot of FOMO fear of missing out, you'll hear that

in the crypto world, so to speak. I was doing well in 2017. We hit an all time high. Bitcoin hit an

all time high of $20,000. Ethereum was doing well as well. I don't remember exactly. I think I had

most of my setup in Ethereum at that point. In early 2018, we reached the market high.

And the only way I can describe it is I froze. I didn't. Well, I knew what to do.

Actually, I was going to say I didn't know what to do. The reality is I probably did.

And I just froze. I didn't. I thought the market was going to go back up. I don't know. I was

indecisive, and the market tanked really quickly. There's reasons why I don't think that particular

market profile will happen again, mostly involving institutional money, money coming in from large

businesses, that kind of thing. We're always going to have bull markets and bear markets,

just like we have in the stock market. But I think we will, as over time, the volatility

in the cryptocurrency market will settle down. I think we had like a 90% drawdown in 2018

during that bear market. It was really crazy. Well, I didn't sell at the top. I didn't sell

I didn't sell halfway down. I held, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with holding a currency

that you believe has long-term value. Certainly Ethereum and Bitcoin do. And even in 2018,

four years ago now, in just a few months, they had established records,

Bitcoin, especially at that time. And, you know, there was no reason to believe that they were

going away. There's nothing wrong with that strategy. Now, as I was telling someone tonight,

there's a lot of coins that we don't know that that's really the case. We'll probably talk about

that on another episode. But if you believe that a coin is going to be around, it's okay not to

sell at the top, like some people do. But what I didn't do, and this truly is my biggest mistake,

and now I'm building a podcast around it, so to speak. As I have explained, I spent a whole

episode doing so. I have a very simple strategy, because simple is easy. Simple is something that

you can do on a consistent basis, and win if it's a winning strategy. And this is, what I didn't do

is during the 2018, 2019, and most of 2020 time period, I didn't buy any more Bitcoin.

Listen to what I'm vixen to say. I can summarize this episode in about however many words this is.

Ten words, whatever. A bull market can make you money. A bear market can make you wealthy.

What do you mean by that McIntosh? A bear market can make you wealthy? That's nonsense. Think about

it. I'm going to pull up the charts. Just a second. And I'm going to give you some numbers,

and not just off the top of my head, like I typically do, which. All right, I'm going to

do, which. All right, so here's a Bitcoin chart. Obviously, you can't see this, but it is. I want

to change the time scale. We're going to go back one month, monthly chart. That should be accurate

enough. I have to scale everything so that I can see what I need to see. Here we go.

Whoops. All right, so I've got a longer term chart pulled up here. I hope I can make this

work. It's not the chart I normally use. Looks like I've got it though. So it looks like Bitcoin

hit a high around mid 2017 and that high. I believe on some exchanges it basically touched $20,000.

This chart isn't that accurate, but it's good enough. Now it went down to

almost exactly a year later, actually, it looks like. 12-12 of 2018, roughly.

This chart's showing like 3,300. I'm sure it was probably a bit lower

at this scale. It's not that granular. How do you make money during a bear market?

You keep buying. You dollar cost average. If I'm buying Bitcoin at $20,000,

let's say I'm investing, let's say, let's just be crazy and say I'm investing $1,000 a month

and it's $20,000. I can only buy 1 20th of a Bitcoin, right? Nothing wrong with that.

But how much can I buy on December the 11th of 2018? I can buy roughly a third of a Bitcoin.

That's a huge difference. And as time goes by and that asset, Bitcoin, becomes more valuable,

that two-tenths, roughly, of a Bitcoin difference becomes bigger and bigger and bigger in value,

right? Because we've seen Bitcoin over the last 12 years. It's grown in value steadily. Ups and

downs, bear markets, bull markets, but it's growing in value. 10 years from now, that two-tenths of a

Bitcoin may make a huge difference in your investment portfolio. That is why a bear market

will make you wealthy. So, I actually look forward to the next bear market. Now, I do not think,

I do not think that the next bear market will be anything like 2018 when we all sat around in the

dumps and watched our investment go down. I can only speak for myself. I didn't believe

at the time. I didn't have faith. I actually believed. I didn't have faith, though. I didn't

know, really, to my core, where we were going. With all this money that I had put into the market

and made some money and so on and so forth, was it just all gone? I mean, was I never going to recover

it? And well, we've seen it come back. And maybe it drops 10% or something, but it's not going to

drop 10% at the top. Maybe it drops 20%, which is probably more likely. I doubt it will only go down

10%. It may go to 50%. What if Bitcoin hits $100,000 in January and then drops to 50?

That's a huge drop. That's the best time to buy it. It's cheaper than it is right now.

Yeah. I promote DCA simply because it's so simple. You just do the same thing. It's tomorrow,

November the 1st, I should be buying some crypto. And that's my plan because I'm dollar cost

averaging that investment. I don't know if this is the top. I don't know if this is the middle.

I think in my opinion, we're somewhere maybe above the middle, but we're not at the top.

I think we've got a couple more months left in this market, but I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm just going to buy what I think I should buy with the money that I've got allocated for that.

And I'm not going to worry about it. Now, if we do get a steep drop, now look,

look, you're free to do whatever you want, of course. And if we get in a situation like in 2018

where we've clearly reached a peak and it started to drop and it doesn't look like we're at the

bottom yet, I may hold off for a month or two because the further down it goes, the more my

money is worth. Essentially, my money's worth the same amount, but the more crypto I can buy.

See, again, going back to that Bitcoin analogy, one-tenth versus three-tenths.

It's a huge difference in the long run if Bitcoin hits 100,000, if Bitcoin hits 200,000.

And it's the same thing with Ethereum or whatever. We buy assets because we believe in their long-term

success. Sometimes that's true. Well, many times we hope it's true. Sometimes that maybe doesn't

pan out. And of course, we can change our position if we need to. But we're buying these for the long

term. Why would I not want to maximize that? So I welcome a bull market, a bear market.

I love a bull market too, by the way. But I love a bear market because I know there's going to be

a bull market on the other side of it. Crypto's not going away. We've got news week after week

after week. MasterCard last week, right? Big announcement. Well, this week, this is going

to be a short episode, but I just wanted to get this out there because I don't want people making

the same mistake that I do. You should listen to this episode right now. Maybe go back to it

when we do get in that bear market, just like the episode from a couple of weeks ago.

What's your plan? And it's the same idea, but it was my mistake. It was a huge mistake, guys.

I've made money in crypto, there's no doubt. But I messed up and it won't happen again.

So we're going to move on to the news. Another big story came out this week. Just a few days

ago. This was five days ago when I recorded this on the 31st. US regulators exploring how banks could

hold crypto assets. This is the FDIC chairman. So in the United States, FDIC, they're essentially

the insurance. If you go to a bank, it's FDIC insured, right? You'll see it right on their door

or something like that. The idea is if your bank becomes insolvent, if something crazy happens,

your money is safe. You get insurance, maybe not the whole amount, but you get

at least some of your money back. So they're a regulatory arm of the US government when it comes

to banking, finance. And they are exploring, hello, wake up people. Crypto is only 11 years old,

12 years old. Thanks for showing up. They're exploring how banks can hold crypto assets.

Welcome to the 21st century. This is not a shock. This was completely,

a completely natural thing. So the time will come and I don't think it will be very long and you'll

be able to go into your bank and maybe you can buy Bitcoin right there. That'd be kind of crazy.

Or maybe they'll hold it and it will be insured, just like your savings account. Now you have a

choice at that point. Do you want the bank to hold your money? Do you want to hold your money? Or

do you want to leave it on a central exchange like we've talked about before? I will tell you my

preference. If I have a lot of money, I'm going to hold it. I recorded another podcast earlier tonight

and I said, when we're dealing with this stuff, it's the centralized exchange or the bank

is like the bank. Of course, the bank is like the bank. So it's the centralized exchange.

They hold your money. They control it. It's really not, well, in the crypto world, they own the keys.

If I hold it in a hardware wallet or in a software wallet for that matter, I own the keys.

It's my money and I like that personally. Now some people may not be more, this will bring in

people who aren't comfortable with crypto exchanges, who aren't comfortable with

the rough edges around the crypto software. This is the kind of thing that will bring mass adoption.

And if you think it's crazy right now, you just wait because this is the stuff that will truly

because this is the stuff that will truly bring this mass adoption.

And for the coins that are proving their value, they will skyrocket.

This actually says, I'll just read through this real quick. A couple of paragraphs out of this,

I think is very important. So the chairman of the FDIC told the Reuters, the newspaper

organization there in an interview on Monday, that a team of US bank regulators is trying to

provide a roadmap for banks to engage with crypto assets. That could include clearer rules over

holding currency in custody to facilitate client trading, using them as collateral for loans.

Okay, I've got 10 Bitcoin, I need a loan for this house at 1% or whatever they're giving out loans

for these days. Or even holding them on their balance sheets like more traditional assets,

like banks hold money, cash, reserves. I think we need to allow banks in this place

while appropriately managing and mitigating risk. She said in an interview on the sidelines of a

fintech conference. So that's interesting. Not unexpected. I'm actually surprised that banks

haven't done more at this point. Banks are very traditional though. You're not going to see a

whole lot of leading tech stuff come from them, but they have to adapt just like in fact, this

was brought up in the podcast earlier tonight, just like Western Union. If Western Union doesn't adapt

apps like strike, which you can use to send and receive Bitcoin instantaneously from all around

the world with very low fees. Western Union, which is a $400 million company, they're going to go

away. They're just going to be gone. They'll be poof. If they don't pivot, they'll be just like

Blockbuster. If these banks don't change, if these banks don't start integrating these services,

and they will, especially after they're given direction from the FDIC, they're going to start

doing it. It will be interesting to see the innovation that happens in this space. I don't

think you're going to see the major innovation from Bank of America or Wells Fargo. It'll be

from the smaller companies. I wish them all the best. I probably won't be using their services a

whole lot, but that's okay. There's a lot of people who will. That's the only news of great note this

week. We'll leave it at that. We're going to go ahead and wrap things up. It's been a little

quicker than normal. I know last week was quite a bit longer. I hope that helps you. I love these

bull markets. I love waking up and checking the phone and going, did we hit the all-time high?

Just happened a couple of days ago with Ethereum. It's like woke up. It jumped up like a hundred

bucks or something and hit. It was like 44.50 or something. I love being in a bull market like this,

but as I've thought about this a lot over the last few years, I've figured out what I feel like were

my weaknesses, and I'm trying my hardest to fix those. I want to pass these lessons on to you all

so hopefully you can learn from them and not make those same mistakes. Hopefully when we do have a

bear market, you can look at it as an opportunity to build true wealth instead of just, oh, it's a

bear market. What are we going to do? It's down whatever. That's it. Hope you have a great week.