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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds, and I am thrilled to be joined again today by my friend Gabriel Custodiate.

Gabriel, welcome to the show. - Hey, Josh, nice to be here. How are you doing? - Very well, very well. Today we're gonna have Bitcoin Central. We're gonna talk extensively about Bitcoin. We've, you know, it's been six months since I've talked extensively about Bitcoin, since we launched the initial version of our Bitcoin Privacy course.

And since that time, there have been some major changes in the Bitcoin marketplace, dramatic drops in Bitcoin price, major changes in the marketplace. And so I wanna discuss some of those changes with you today. Quick intro on Gabriel for the uninitiated. Gabriel Custodiate is the founder of the Watchman Privacy Platform, the podcast, the book.

Excellent, he's an excellent privacy consultant. And we have been teamed up for quite a while here on what we call our Bitcoin Privacy course, where we teach you how to buy and own and use Bitcoin in a completely anonymous and private way. And so Gabriel, welcome back again. I'll let you kick it off today.

Where should we begin? - Well, I just want to start by giving people the how and the what and the why really quickly. So we started this Bitcoin Privacy course and the website is bitcoinprivacycourse.com. We did this live six months ago, and then it was edited, it was made into a recording.

It's four hours of Bitcoin tutorial, as well as a privacy tutorial. And the reason that we made this course is pretty simple. And it's becoming more evident as time goes along. We see a lot of dangerous things on the horizon. We see right now and coming up, inflation, cancellation, collapsing economies, tyrannical movements in many countries, censorship.

And the fact is private, sovereign Bitcoin, and I emphasize that fact because 99% of Bitcoin is not that, it's simply a fantastic solution to get around a lot of that stuff that we're seeing and that we will continue to see. With private and sovereign Bitcoin, which is what we teach in the course, you can, by memory, store and transport something that has value basically across the world.

You don't need permission to use it. It has no boundaries. It's effectively uncensorable. And you don't even need a digital device to take it with you. It exists on an amazing invention called the blockchain. And Bitcoin is becoming more and more accepted. So in this course, and we're basically trying to get more people to become interested in this.

And there's obviously a selfish reason. We would love your support, but also we want more people to be part of this community because we benefit when more people are part of Bitcoin. But I just want to go over the course again really quickly. So we talk about what Bitcoin is, and we do this in a way that not a lot of people really do.

I was complimented recently. I've been doing a lot of Bitcoin stuff. And one of the premier figures in the Bitcoin node industry said that I had my episode on Bitcoin nodes, had explained Bitcoin nodes in the best way he had ever heard them explained. And so that's kind of my approach.

I tried to start with the fundamentals, the basics. It's not dumbed down. Okay, our course is not dumbed down. It's just comprehensible. I'm a teacher, and I dislike a lot of the tech community that is talking over people's heads. So we talk about what Bitcoin is. We talk about how to acquire it privately through several means.

We teach you how to use a noncustodial wallet, which is how you actually possess your Bitcoin. We show you how to manage the Bitcoin. We talk about hardware wallets, various other things. We talk about coin control, which is how to make sure your Bitcoin is not exposed moving forward.

And we also talk about other crypto. So in essence, it is the A to Z Bitcoin course, all the stuff that you need to understand Bitcoin and to acquire it and be able to use it. Now, you can't find this stuff online. Trust me, I've digested hundreds of hours of material in preparation for the course.

None of these explain Bitcoin in such a direct way that I think I have done in this course. I've read every book on Bitcoin, and I found that there's a lot of generalization. People say Bitcoin is decentralized, but I never explain exactly what that means. So I try to explain things from the basics.

And I've also noticed with the other material out there that I've kept up reading, some are just outdated, they're incorrect, they're incomplete. So I would say that this course, we both agree that this course is money well spent to get the direct stream of the essentials of private Bitcoin.

And so I just want to say, before we get into a discussion here, Bitcoin is here to stay. You can use it today, right? Increasingly, a lot of privacy services, VPNs, internet, virtual mailboxes, domains, online, all sorts of businesses are starting to take Bitcoin, which they see as a great privacy alternative.

You can collect money for your online business without being censored. A lot of people are moving over to Bitcoin. It's never been more popular. It's never been more misunderstood. And there is a serious crackdown coming on Bitcoin that is acquired through popular channels, such as online exchanges. So that's why we talk about sovereign Bitcoin and private Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin is not complicated. And the only thing we're selling in this course is knowledge, it's information. We're not selling a commission fee for some kind of Bitcoin service. Frederick Douglass said, "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." And that's what we're teaching here. We want people to be literate in Bitcoin, not just literate, understanding it, but be able to acquire it.

There's a practical element to this. You will be able to go out and acquire your own Bitcoin as a result of this course. So, you know, it's a great time right now to get into Bitcoin. It's at a cheaper price than a year ago. You have burgeoning communities where you can make good friends in person, in conferences, or on Telegram.

So, you know, if you desire freedom, if you desire financial privacy, an escape from the crumbling fiat money systems around you, then you simply have to learn Bitcoin, right? It's not optional. And our course is the best way to start that journey. And so, if you're interested, it's BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com.

We have, right now, for a limited time, a $50 discount if you use the promotional code "October." October. And it will expire on or after October 31st. So, it's a limited time. Go get this course, get the discount. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. We also have, if you go to our website, BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, we have added a clip of our course so that you can listen to about 20, 25 minutes.

If you're unsure, if you'll like the style, you can see the style right there at our course. So, you can see what the course is all about. And we have a lot of other information there if you want to learn more. So, BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, promotional code "October," limited time offer.

Jump in on this and you won't regret it. Yeah, that's a perfect summation of, I guess, of the course and of things. And I continue to consume information, teaching, etc. And I continue to concur with what you said, that for the simplest, most direct path into Bitcoin, especially intelligently into Bitcoin, Bitcoin that you own and control, Bitcoin that doesn't have a paper trail of information littered out across the internet, it's one of the best on-ramps.

And so, definitely go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com and use the promo code "October" in order to buy it. I guess, should we pivot then to the elephant in the room of the price and how that affects some of the stuff that we've talked about? Yeah, I think we should do that.

So, that initial pitch is kind of the basics of this episode. Now, we're going to kind of pivot towards answering some of the developments in the last six months. So, I want to start by asking you that question, Joshua. So, when we did the course, Bitcoin was in dollar terms, I think in the high 40s of thousands.

Now, it's under 20,000. It's been hovering there for a while. So, why should people be interested in Bitcoin if the price has plummeted in the last six months? What do you think? I think, first of all, it's been interesting to watch the psychology that when we first released the course, there was a fever pitch around Bitcoin going to the moon.

It was at 40,000. It was going higher. Of course, it had come down, but there was still a good huge amount of energy in the room. And when you reflect upon the fact that that price has cut in half, I think that energy has disappeared in many corners and that you have far fewer speculators than people, far less interest than before.

And so, I'll give you my thoughts on it. The first thing that I really appreciate and believe is very important is simply this, that in the course, never did we talk about Bitcoin speculation. Never did we talk about speculation on Bitcoin as a way to become very, very wealthy very quickly.

And in some ways, I think... So, this used to be my number one objection to Bitcoin. Kind of back up. Long-time listeners of Radical Personal Finance know that I was not an early adopter of Bitcoin, nor was I a loud proponent of Bitcoin. I realized along the way that I was mistaken in a few things.

And there's actually a public apology episode of me apologizing to my audience for not having encouraged them to buy Bitcoin earlier. And yet, one of the biggest reasons that I was not an enthusiastic proponent of Bitcoin had to do with the price instability. I thought then, and I still do think, that there is fundamentally a broken idea.

The idea being that you should keep and use Bitcoin as money, while simultaneously the Bitcoin price is fluctuating up and down massively. I don't think that that... It may be a great investment, it may be a great speculation, but it doesn't... Something whose price fluctuates wildly on a daily and weekly and monthly basis, it doesn't qualify as money.

Because while you can be really happy when you hit it on the right side, "Hey, I bought Bitcoin at 7,000, now it's at 55." Great, that can feel really good, but then it can also feel equal... It can feel much worse on the other side when it's plummeting in value.

And this has been an issue for many years, with many kinds of things. I'll give you another example. I would love to see gold and silver in their coins and rounds denominations used more frequently in transactions. Because as our ability to access physical dollars in reasonable quantities has diminished due to the suppression of the use of cash, the war on cash in the American landscape, then we need things that are valued at a higher...

that are valued in more compact denominations. And gold and silver coins can potentially fulfill that as a way of transacting between people without necessarily reverting to dollars. But gold and silver have this basic problem that once you have them, you don't want to spend them. Once you have it, you're like, "Eh, it might go up in the future, and I want to keep it, I want to keep it." And it's a really important lesson there, because you actually learn that gold and silver are more valuable than US dollars because there's an appreciation possibility, but it limits the ability for that currency or that substance, that commodity, to function as a form of money.

And I think the same problem applies to Bitcoin, that it's sometimes very difficult when prices are high to get people to part with their Bitcoin. And if you have massive increases and decreases in the value of Bitcoin, then it can be hard to view it as a stable part of your savings.

And so the strategies that we talk about are primarily focused on owning Bitcoin, on using Bitcoin, and on storing money in Bitcoin privately, but they're not banking on the long-term growth of Bitcoin to the moon. And so while that can be really nice, and it can be really helpful, and if that happens, it would be really nice to own your Bitcoin privately, and I think that it makes a lot of sense to have some portion of your overall portfolio of assets held in speculative things that may increase in value significantly, that's not the primary focus.

Our primary focus is on how to acquire it and how to use it and how to store it in a private and secure way. And so while from the perspective of a short-range investment, having your investment drop in value by 50%, that's a pretty bad investment. That doesn't say anything though about the long-term future, and it has really been a buying opportunity.

If you think that Bitcoin may regain previous highs or may go higher in the future, it really is nice to be able to acquire Bitcoin at the $20,000 per coin mark as compared to $40,000 or $50,000 or whatever it was before. So I think we should be very honest about, as I try to be, as I try to just state clearly, that when your asset cuts in value massively and swings around massively, that is a major problem for the storehouse of wealth.

But it doesn't fundamentally change your ability to transact in the Bitcoin, and it doesn't fundamentally change the long-term proposition. It does give you potentially a buying opportunity. Now time will tell. Do we go from 20 to 10 or do we go from 20 to 100? I don't know. And so I want to employ all of the good financial planning practices that I believe very strongly in, diversification, thoughtfulness, what money should be invested, how you should look at it, etc.

But at its core, the change in Bitcoin price hasn't affected anything that we've taught in the course. - Yep, I think that is well said, Joshua. And I'll just reiterate that. I also not talked about Bitcoin as an investment. I talk about it as a tool. I use it as a tool.

The people that I consult with and help use it as a tool. You can use Bitcoin to buy things right now. You can use it for private payments. You can use it as a way to escape cancel culture, PayPal has recently been talking about how they are not going to allow people to use PayPal who have views that are contradictory to the pervading views.

Essentially, that's essentially what they said. And so if you accept Bitcoin, that is a way around that. As we said, Bitcoin is permissionless. So this is a fantastic tool whose uses are expanding. Do I wish the price would keep going up or remain very stable? Of course I do.

That would make it all the better. I would point out, of course, that in the last six months, we've seen all kinds of financial assets dropping in price. You talk about volatility. Look at Tesla stock or something like this. So everything is dropping right now. And in the next couple of years, financially, I think we will see what the true assets are, which are the things that will hold their value and maybe go up.

Will Bitcoin be one of those? I hope so. But for now, we have something that works. It works. I've been using a lot of... I've been using and helping people to use a lot of Bitcoin in the last six months, and it works. You can use stuff. You can use it as a way to have hidden money that is easily transportable, and it is accepted in most places around the world.

And that is fantastic. And I'll just say one more thing, which is if you believe that Bitcoin or gold or anything else has inherent value, then the price right now is simply a buying opportunity. There are all these memes on Bitcoin websites where you have somebody... Like there's the two lines, right?

And one line says Bitcoin, you know, $30,000, and there's only one guy in it. And the other one says Bitcoin $60,000, and everybody's crowded around it. So the idea is if you think something has inherent value, then the $20,000 price is simply a discount if you think in those terms.

So that's all I'll say about the price drop in Bitcoin. We can still use it. Who knows where the future lies, but for now, and I think for definitely the immediate future, it will continue to be the best financial privacy tool that we have. - Yeah. I think none of us are immune to the psychology of the irrationality of the crowds.

I think of myself, I could name a half a dozen times where in theory I'm supposed to know what I'm talking about, right? I'm formally trained and pretty experienced at this point in talking about financial markets, and I still observe my own emotions and how you get into this buying frenzy when everyone else is a buying frenzy, and then you get into this kind of pool of despair when everyone else is in a pool of despair, and you think, "Ah, maybe it's not going," you know.

It's all a nightmare, and protecting ourselves against that psychology, the only way that I know how to do that since humans are psychologically frail creatures, the only way I know how to do it is with rules and systems and kind of thoughts that have been thought in advance of the situation, and then plans that you simply implement and put into place.

So it is definitely an issue that has to be dealt with. One of the great problems with Bitcoin is at its core, I don't know any way that you can say, "Here's what the true value of Bitcoin is or what it should be." You can recognize the fact that there's a limited supply.

You can come up with various formulas. I've read a significant number of them, but at its core, I think Bitcoin is best said that the value is based upon what people perceive it to be, but at its core, people's willingness to accept Bitcoin as transaction and the ease with which we can get into Bitcoin and out of Bitcoin makes it increasingly useful, especially in these times.

I think that at its core, the technology is something that is so needed right now because the news of PayPal this last week is of them-- the news of PayPal this last week is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what payment processors and what banks and what these rails of society have been doing to people who don't conform to whatever the current thing is.

It's been a big problem. And I see Bitcoin as a technology that fundamentally solves that problem because it's a permissionless way to engage in digital transactions between people. And that's a technology that I want to support. That's a technology that I want to use, that I want to see expressed widely, because there is a small learning curve.

That's why we have a whole class on how to do it. If there were no learning curve, you wouldn't need a class. There is a small learning curve, but it's a technology that is needed for the future, for the future of freedom, for the future of individuals' ability to transact with one another, to exchange value for value among free citizens.

It's fundamentally needed. And so I want to see it spread into wider and wider use for that reason. I agree. And I'll just kind of cap that off by saying that in terms of stability and volatility, perceived value, it might be that everything has perceived value. If we look at the ARK Innovation Fund, this infamous fund that has all the kind of the major popular tech stocks in it, I'm looking at it.

It was at $156 a share. Now it's down to $36 over the course of basically a year. So perceived value, volatility, nothing is beyond that right now. Is Bitcoin part of that? Yeah, it is. Would we like it to be more stable? Certainly. But for now, I just want people to recognize that we're not saying put everything in Bitcoin.

We're just saying test the waters. It's a fantastic tool. That's something I've learned. I have all kinds of skepticism and problems with Bitcoin. I'll listen to Peter Schiff. I think a lot of stuff he says is very true about Bitcoin. But it is a tool that we have that we can participate in, and it has value when we give it value, when we give it to other people.

And so we can be part of that, and you can start understanding what Bitcoin is. And I assure you, if you look into Bitcoin, you're going to change your mind about what you thought about it. Not saying put all your money. We're not saying put all your savings. We're not saying that this is going to the moon.

We're just saying this is a fantastic technology that is not going away, and you should take part in it. And you can learn a lot of those basics at bitcoinprivacycourse.com. Yeah. Let me add two arguments that I meant to mention earlier that pertain to this subject. Number one, earlier I was saying that a reason I was a very slow adopter of Bitcoin is this perception of volatility.

I'm sorry, this reality of volatility. And I thought, how can Bitcoin be money if everyone's getting into it because of its investing potential, the potential that might make them rich overnight? How can it ever serve as money until it smooths out and stops being volatile? But I've since realized there's a flip side to it.

How could Bitcoin have ever become as popular as it is if there hadn't been a massive increase in price? If Bitcoin were still exactly as functional as it is today, but the price were still measured at a dollar per coin, I don't think the utility of Bitcoin would be as significant as it now is because I don't think there would be nearly enough people who are in it, who are involved in it, who would be accepting it.

And it would have been perhaps relegated to the unknown history of other forms of digital gold and digital currency and things that have been tried in the past. But because the price increased so substantially, thus minting a huge number of Bitcoin millionaires and billionaires very, very quickly, then it created this passionate community of people who have worked tirelessly to see the technology adopted more broadly.

And because they've had the money and the value that could be turned from Bitcoin back into fiat currency, such as the US dollar or the euro or the El Salvadorian, I forgot the name of their currency, or whatever it is, then because you can go back in at a much different scale, it's created so much energy around it that it's been much more widely adopted.

And so this thing that I used to think was a bug, I now accept as a feature. The volatility has its downsides, but it also comes with major approaches otherwise. And I've been thinking about metaphors, and one metaphor I've considered has been things like gold rushes. If you go back to a powerhouse economy, a state like California, the California gold rush itself was a key pivotal point in bringing the development to California that it previously lacked.

So the gold rush, there was a big rush, and then it petered out very quickly, and the gold disappeared. But that gold rush was necessary to bring attention to what California had to offer, and that laid the foundation for the behemoth that is the California economy today. So I'm not saying that Bitcoin was a gold rush and that it's over.

I'm not making any prediction. I don't know, but I'm saying that that price volatility I think can be and is a very important feature of the overall situation. I forgot my second point, so we'll go on. Gabriel, since we've started talking about Bitcoin privacy, I know you have followed the development of the privacy community related to Bitcoin very, very closely.

Tell us what's been happening in that community. Yeah, so I think it's been a lot more of the same in the privacy community. There are a lot more people interested in Bitcoin privacy because they understand that since Bitcoin has a public blockchain, if you don't treat this carefully, you can end up being censored.

You can end up having it blocked if you're using a public exchange. And a lot of people are realizing that as a result of what's happening in Ukraine, Russia, or the Canadian protests. There are a few examples like that. A lot of people who have been canceled online, and not just for having conservative views or what have you, but people in various industries that are not well-respected, they do not have reliable banking partners.

And so a lot of people are understanding the need for private and sovereign Bitcoin. And so I see a huge swell of people in these privacy Bitcoin communities, whether that's Reddit or Telegram. There's a lot of great communities, Sparrow, the Sparrow wallet, Telegram community, the Samurai wallet, Bitcoin community.

A lot of these people are sharing their knowledge. They're fantastic groups of people who understand Bitcoin and its radical potential. And I just see it doubling down. Recently, I finally got my hands on a Bitcoin node, a pre-built Bitcoin node called the Ronin Dojo Tanto. That's a mouthful. I have some episodes on that.

And basically, this is a privacy node that has a number of privacy features. It filters all the traffic through Tor. It connects directly to a Samurai wallet, which is a specialized privacy wallet. We talk about this in our course. And I finally got my hands on one of these, and so did a lot of other people.

They came out with another batch of these. And it's just kind of emphasized that not everybody is out there investing in Bitcoin. There are people who believe in this stuff. They use it. And when you have a Bitcoin node such as that, you are literally one of the people.

You are literally part of Bitcoin because a node is one part of Bitcoin. And as long as your node is running, then the Bitcoin network is essentially running. So there's a lot of fascinating things when one gets into kind of the fundamentals of Bitcoin, which privacy people do. And I'll just say that in the last six months, a lot of people that I talk to, just in terms of privacy, they no longer buy VPNs with fiat currency because there's a risk involved.

They're not going to buy sensitive items online with the credit card. They're starting to use Bitcoin. And we see a lot of online services starting to accept Bitcoin now. And you can use Bitcoin for these things. If you need to send money to a friend in Russia right now, you're not able or going to use fiat currencies.

You're probably going to use something like Bitcoin. So we're just seeing the use case increase for Bitcoin. We're seeing a lot more services start to accept it. And a lot of people, just a small but passionate group of people who are coming together and kind of, I think, form the spine of Bitcoin.

You mentioned the interest broadly in Bitcoin. I think that's great. And we need the privacy community, which represents a small but important part, to also start burgeoning. And so that's just kind of what I see in the privacy circles. Not anything, any fantastic new technologies. We still have a lot of the best technologies.

That's, you know, whirlpooling. That is, of course, having your own sovereign ownership of Bitcoin in a noncustodial wallet. These are all things we talk about in the course. All these things are the same. A lot of the Bitcoin people are not getting into the lightning network, which is kind of what they call a layer two part of Bitcoin, where it kind of speeds up the transactions and such.

The privacy community sees some faults in that, so they're staying with the "on-chain" aspect of Bitcoin. So there's discussions going on. It's a passionate community. And people who trade amongst themselves and find great use in having financial privacy with Bitcoin. So that's kind of what I've seen over the past year.

Yeah. At its core, to me, that's the-- When this originally started, when the idea for this course originally came, at least in the story that's in my mind--you correct me if I miss something-- but I was speaking with you about privacy features, and we started talking about Bitcoin. And I described my dream.

My dream was, I imagined a scenario where I have to leave my house, and everything is taken from me. The goons with guns show up at the door, knock on the door, they confiscate everything. I have to leave, and let's just pretend I leave just in time not to be arrested.

And I'll give reality to this scenario in a moment. I leave just in time not to be arrested. And everything is confiscated. My bank accounts are shut down. Everything is confiscated. But I'm able to get on an airplane, and I've got a passport that allows me to get out across the border.

So can I show up in a foreign country, in a foreign destination, with a passport, and be let in, and nothing else on me? No information, no physical wallet, no nothing. And can I arrive in that country, and can I figure out a way to gain access to the money that I had set aside in Bitcoin, stored on the blockchain, for me, for this time, without anybody's permission?

And that's the question. That's the scenario that I thought a lot about, and that you solved in terms of teaching how to do it in the course. What's been interesting to me is I continue to have exposure and contact with people all around the world. And just last week, I met at a local--a friend of mine brought a new friend of his.

He just met a Russian refugee to a little Bible study that we do. And he came in with this guy, and I was listening to this guy's story. And it was exactly the scenario that I described. This guy was in his late 40s. He was living in a part of Russia with his wife and three of his children.

A fourth of his child was already out of the country. And he was worried and saw the mobilization, the Russian mobilization. And he was in the Russian military when he was a younger man, before he was a Christian. And then he became a Christian, and he came to the point where he said, "I couldn't go and serve in the Russian military and do that." And so he fled with his family.

And it was--all of the problems of access to money were present. All of his stuff was in Russia, had no ability to leave with that stuff. He couldn't even transact assets. He still owns real estate in Russia. He can't sell it and get the money through normal means. And he wound up being a refugee.

And thankfully he was able to find a place to go, and they gave him the ability to stay there. But now he's got to put his life back together. And so I was just really interested to see, like, here is this exact scenario that I've thought about for years, staring me in the face with somebody who was a Russian refugee.

It's been the same with Russian refugees, Ukrainian refugees, Syrian refugees, Venezuelan refugees, and refugees from other countries as well. I follow a couple of--there are a couple of cases right now of refugees that are from countries that-- you would say, "Why are there any refugees from there?" But they're people who are being persecuted for their political beliefs, their religious beliefs.

And I don't use the word "persecuted" lightly. I mean "genuinely persecuted." And yet they had to go. And so while Bitcoin has many use cases that are not so extreme, in the ultimate extreme form, what I described is the only thing I know about, the only way I know that you could go across a border with nothing, literally nothing, and yet--except the information that's in your head-- and then get into a completely foreign country on the other side of the world and have access to some money, however much you happen to have in Bitcoin, have access to some money which can set things up for you.

And that is a powerful, powerful tool. To me, that value offsets some of the volatility of Bitcoin. What I have found is whenever I have to fire sale an asset, all of a sudden you're really happy if you can just sell it. Imagine you have a gold coin, and here's my one ounce gold coin, and you're in a place where every--you can't--let's pretend that you can't present identification when you're trying to turn that gold coin into local fiat currency.

And somebody says, "Okay, well, I'll do the deal for you, and I'll give you 70% of the value to do the deal, but with no identification." Then very quickly you accept it, because that's what's necessary. And so in that scenario, the discounts and things like that, the volatility, it's just part of the deal, so to speak.

The other comment I was going to say earlier that I had forgotten was, as you mentioned, Gabriel, virtually every asset is based simply-- the value is based upon what people want for it. There's really no intrinsic value in anything. We can--some things have a longer track record that we can assess the historic value, but at its core, there's really almost nothing that has true intrinsic value.

Clearly, fiat currencies don't have true intrinsic value. Their value is based upon what they can be used for and the perception that wide varieties of people have for them. We see that right now with the strength of the U.S. dollar. It's incredibly powerful and strong right now, even though it's experiencing its own inflation, etc., which is eroding its value.

But it's powerful and strong because people perceive the United States to be powerful and strong, and I think that's a right perception. We ignore the fact that the U.S. dollar itself has lost, what, 97% of its value in the last who knows how many decades, that virtually its value has been destroyed, but we say it's the best thing available to me right now.

And even if you go to hardcore commodities, the value of a commodity is based upon its market price, but it's also based upon the perception of its value. So I continue to believe that Bitcoin is the best thing that we've got for an alternative system. And while I have my reservations about the real bulls of Bitcoin, I think it's the best thing we've got for an alternative system that severs the lines of control on payment processing, digital transfer of value among individuals, etc., and that's a truly valuable thing.

Yes, Josh, and it's come to the point where you start to ask, "Where am I going to have my wealth? Where am I going to put part of my money?" Because if you are in Britain, the pound has dropped by, what, 40% in the last year. 40%. That's a powerful fiat currency.

40%. Gold has dropped about 25% since its peak a year and a half ago. So we have all these things. All these things are dropping. So where are you going to put part of your wealth? Robert Kiyosaki says that he puts his money in bullets, gold, and Bitcoin. And he recognizes that commodities are important and that he doesn't know what's going to take off.

And so it's simply a matter of saying, "Look, what are your other options? What are your other options at this point?" There are vulnerabilities everywhere you look in finance. And Bitcoin can be one small part of your portfolio if you want to do it that way, or it can be a part of your privacy and sovereignty strategy and a darn good one at that.

Absolutely. I'll give you the other B because in the prepper world, they talk about beans, bullets, and Band-Aids and bullion. So there's the other B. Kiyosaki puts his money in bullets, bullion, and Bitcoin. So, yeah, it's exciting. And so I want to hasten as a financial planner to say, I believe that U.S.

dollars should be a fundamental part. Even in inflationary times, cash is king. And so if you're looking for a way to preserve value, I think that the best currency that you can have right now is U.S. dollars. But you should always offset your dollar exposure with alternative currencies and even speculative currencies such as Bitcoin.

Anything else, Gabriel, to wrap up? No, I'll just conclude, double down. Bitcoinprivacycourse.com. We have our promo code just for the month of October. Type in October on our website for $50 off. This will only last for a couple of weeks. So get in on this. It is, as we've said, the most radical personal finance decision you might ever make.

And Bitcoin is not going anywhere. It's something that you need to understand. Why not start now? Why not get a head start on at least understanding this? We're not talking about putting all of your money into it. We're talking about understanding a thing that I've come to see as a phenomenal privacy freedom tool.

And you should definitely have it in your arsenal and be conversant in it. Bitcoinprivacycourse.com. I'll add that even if you just do it as training. So from the world of prepping, I have--whenever people have asked me about, "What gun should I buy?" I'm like, "Yeah, go ahead and get a gun and here are some thoughts on it." But I think the most important thing that you can invest in when you're doing something new is usually training.

And so that's true whether it's firearms. It's true whether it's food preservation. It's true whether it's investing. It's true in any case. The money that you spend on training and information up front will pay dividends down the road. In the privacy space, I have found the biggest barrier to privacy is knowledge and experience.

Knowing what to do to achieve privacy in some particular area of your life. And then the experience of having done it. And there's a significant learning curve. First time around, you go and buy your first VPN. And then the VPN, you realize, "You know what? I'm not sure that that's actually a high-quality VPN." So you learn about a high-quality VPN.

Then you realize, "I've created a vulnerability here with the trail between my VPN and my bank account or my credit card. Maybe I'll go ahead and see if I can get a VPN with a Bitcoin purchase or with cash, etc." Every stage of privacy involves a learning curve. Same thing with internationalization.

I've done a lot of internationalization work to buy my freedom over the last few years. And there has been a major learning curve. And I'm so glad that I did it. And I can shorten the learning curve for other people now. But I needed the experience to learn the lessons.

And the same thing applies with Bitcoin. If you want to transact in Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin, own Bitcoin, you need to do it and learn it. And then if you want to do it privately, you need to do it and learn it. And so if you buy our course, our course is not expensive, especially with a $50 discount.

But what's more important is then to get started. And your first Bitcoin transactions, maybe, "I'm going to buy $200 worth of Bitcoin." That's never going to make you rich if it goes to the moon. But what it is going to do is it's going to allow you to start to have experience and to start to pay attention to the market and start to learn how it works, to transact a few things.

And that experience can pay off in spades whenever you decide you're ready for it. That information, that experience is so, so valuable. So go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Use promo code "OCTOBER" to save $50 on the course until October 31. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Thank you so much, Gabriel. Thank you. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season.

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