#102: Investing in the Most Promising Asset Class - Crypto Assets
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We have Shahar Abrams. And we are going to talk with Shahar about crypto. And I think everyone has questions.
He’s passionate about helping his clients form, plan, and execute effective crypto investment strategies hand-tailored to their personal and financial goals.
Shahar Abrams is a former blockchain industry professional with experience leading enterprise blockchain deployments at IBM. He is one of the few people to straddle the “traditional” enterprise blockchain world and the more well-known public-blockchain space also referred to as crypto.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
[1:37] His background and how he discovered the blockchain and bitcoin
[5:40] What exactly blockchain is and what it means
[9:43] Why makes Bitcoin have value
[13:05] About the ledger, who can access it, and how it is controlled
[16:12] How safe and secure are Bitcoin’s transactions
[18:13] How these crypto firms are mining, making money, how do they work, what’s in it for them and what are doing?
[20:31] How the transactions work and how you can earn % of interest on your wallet
[23:02] What’s the difference between cryptocurrency names?
[25:14] About his website called Road to Babylon
[30:09] His consultations and how he can give people a plan and strategy to invest in Bitcoin with the course he just built
Shahar Top Tip’s
“A blockchain has actually been around for a while idea of a blockchain is that cryptographically linked, chain of data, where every piece of data we put, it's a database. It's just a fancy kind of database. But every piece of data we put in this database; we cryptographically link it to the data before. And so, if anything in the data changes, it breaks. So, for this reason, blockchains are said to be very secure, very tamper-evident, and thus somewhat tamper-resistant”
“What gives any asset value I would say at the very fundamental level is trust, people's trust in the asset that it's worth something that it has some use. So those things drive the value for these types of assets in with Bitcoin or other crypto assets. I would say what gives Bitcoin value is the fact that you can trust it. Because we don't know how much gold there is in the ground. But we all know how much Bitcoin there is at a given point in time, and how much Bitcoin there will ever be. And we can never make more. And it's actually more difficult to counterfeit. And if someone were able to counterfeit a Bitcoin would not no longer have value”
“Bitcoin literally is the single most secure record of data that we have ever created in humanity. It's the most immutable secure way of storing data possible, because of its decentralized nature, and the amount of computing power, that's behind the network as a whole”
“And mining on Bitcoin and proof of work is the process of you know, basically brute forcing a math problem, right, so doing lots of operations again and again on a specific algorithm called Sha 256. And right now, there is around a few quintillions of these operations happening per second on the Bitcoin network per second. So, quintillions of hashes per second, every second of every day on the Bitcoin network. That's what is behind bitcoin. When people have what gives it value? Well, that's the security mechanism of it at play”
“And nowadays, there are really good interfaces. For wallets that make it super easy, where you can just put in what you want to send, you'll put in the address you want to send, and the wallet does the rest, right? Some of these wallets in fact, when you hold your crypto in these wallets, they, in fact, will pay you interest, they'll pay you passive income on your crypto, much like a bank would you know, for your deposits, except like, 10 to 50 times more interest”
“All of my bitcoin that I hold in my wallet, I earn upwards of 3% per year on all of my Aethalium that I hold in my wallet, I earn upwards of 5% per year on and all of their there another type of crypto coin called stable coins, which are just digital crypto representations of something like a US dollar"
“The difference is the characteristics of the network. So, Dogecoin has much fewer miners, it has unlimited supply right now. So, there's no plan cap supply for Dogecoin I think every day, there are about 14 million Dogecoin being mined, and that'll continue indefinitely. And what you have to ask when you're thinking about, which Cryptos to buy, is what network you want to kind of be a part of”
“Bitcoin really stands out in this regard, it has the most hashing power, the largest network effect, I think in crypto now, because we are talking about networks, we're talking about investing in networks. The most important thing is network effect, because the larger the network effect, the more users there are on the Bitcoin network”
“What I try to impress on people is if you pull back the curtain, there's a lot of value going on. And there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, it's moving very quickly. And most, I think you're also right, that most people jump in and don't really know what they're doing. In fact, 95% of people fall into that category, that they're investing in stuff. In fact, they've never used it, they don't know, a third of you know, what we just talked about in terms of how it works. And in my opinion, that's a recipe for disaster”
“I think anytime you invest in something that you don't understand, it's a recipe for disaster if you look at any serious investor, all the best investors in the world, the one thing that I'll tell you is they don't invest in things that they don't understand, right, they'll never do it. So, I don't want people to be you know, I think it's an incredibly promising space, I think it's a massive investment opportunity, regardless of what type of investor you are”
Resources from Shahar
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Mike Stohler
What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income. Now, if you're wanting to get ahead financially, and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement, and you know you'll have more choices, if you can do more with your money. Now, if you've wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them, and you want actionable ideas, with honest pros and cons, and no fluff. Welcome to the richer geek podcast. We're here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm Mike Stohler. And in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things, and learn how you can too.
Alright, everybody, welcome back to another great episode of the Richer geek podcast. We have Shahar Abrams. And we are going to talk with Shahar about crypto. And I think everyone has questions. Everyone, you know, is wondering what the heck is crypto assets? We've all heard about it. But what exactly is it so welcome, Shahar How you doing?
Shahar Abrams
I'm doing great, Mike thanks.
Mike Stohler
Your background is your you've done some type of traditional enterprise type blockchain stuff. So give us a little bit about who you are, what your background is, before we dive into it,
Shahar Abrams
or so my background is in, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Growing up, I studied finance in college. But I kind of quickly realized a life in you know, banking, or in the traditional financial system wasn't for me. So after I graduated, I think I did the biggest, you know, cop out thing that people do, which is you go into consulting, because you don't know what the heck you want to do. So I you know, in consulting, I joined IBM, working, you know, in their federal government practice, as a consultant, and I did a lot of analytical work data science type of stuff, that's kind of the track I was on. And then in the mid 2017, I discovered the tech, you know, the blockchain and what this actually was, I had heard about Bitcoin before, you know, it was kind of a fanciful, you know, thing for me, I didn't really take the time to understand it. And then 2017, that changed, I, you know, read a very good book that kind of explained the tech and immediately I was hooked, and it for me, it kind of presented a solution to a few problems I was really worried about, you know, am still worried about but now at least I can be optimistic about them, which is, I think, you know, some of the biggest problems we face today, trust on the internet, right, and security, right, and kind of individual sovereignty on the internet, which is really something we can't be so comfortable with right now. And crypto as tech, as a ecosystem, and as even kind of a philosophical movement, you know, is is trying to answer those questions in a way that I think emphasizes industry individuality and pride, personal privacy, personal control, some things that I really care about. So I started working, and I started investing in the space in 2017. As luck would have it, you know, it was pretty good timing. For me, it was like the middle of 2017. So I quickly made a lot of money, which I wasn't expecting. And it definitely exposed the fact that I had no idea what I was doing as an investor.
And so you know, I didn't sell anything after, you know, making 400% and a few months, right, I just hobbled right. I thought that's what you're supposed to do. And I watched over the next two years, 18 and 19, I watched all of my paper gains disappear. And and then some. But you know, I was totally hooked. I kept doing research on it. I also dedicated myself to, you know, not making that mistake, again, getting better at understanding investments and strategies and stuff like that. I started working at IBM in our blockchain practice, by the end of 2018. And I was going to lots of conferences, learning a lot more about the space learn a lot more about investments. And, you know, by the end of 2019, I was pretty much almost all in to crypto, my conviction was just so high and I knew, you know, I could take that risk, being a young guy with, you know, no dependents and that kind of thing. And, you know, fast forward a couple years that that really paid off for me and now I get to focus on doing what I'm really passionate about, which is helping spread the ideology of this technology and its promise and its benefit to as many people as I can So I that that's kind of my MO for focusing now on education.
Mike Stohler
Oh, you know, for an old guy like me that, you know, I'm thinking, I don't even know what blockchain is, you know, I keep everyone these little buzz words. And, and you know, Elon Musk is talking about all it's no. Here's what I don't understand it is it's a technology, but people are buying and selling it and paying things for it. I mean, what is this thing? It's because some people say, well, it doesn't really exist.
Shahar Abrams
Right? Yeah, that's a great place to start. So let's get out there. So, a blockchain blockchains have actually been around for a while idea of a blockchain is that cryptographically linked, linked, you know, chain of data, where every piece of data we put, it's a database, okay? It's just a fancy kind of database. But every piece of data we put in this database, we cryptographically link it to the data before. And so if anything in the data changes, it breaks, the cryptographic link is very obvious, right? So for this reason, blockchains are said to be very secure, very tamper evident, there are fully tamper evident, and thus somewhat tamper resistant, right? Because you have this immutable record of the data. Right now, that idea was around for a while, the innovation that happened in 2008, with the Bitcoin white paper, was this idea of distributed consensus. So how do we actually take this type of database of blockchain and make it decentralized so that we can actually fully trust the data? Because, you know, there's nobody with, you know, God Mode over the database that can't then can in fact go in and perhaps changing the hashes? And more importantly, right, if this is a system that's going to be used for value transfer, which again, not a new idea, ever since the internet was created, there were people working on this problem, well, how do we send value natively on the internet, that would be great. The problem was, every time you tried to do it, it was centralized, and so would get shut down or it would get corrupted. But with this innovation of distributed consensus, combined with this very high fidelity way of storing data in a blockchain, you actually can achieve this. And that's what Bitcoin and now many other crypto crypto assets have proven. And so what is actually you know, it is that that has the value, right is just, you know, numbers on a screen, right? A data entry in a database, not not really so different from how your money is in the bank now, right? That there's no actual money, there's just numbers on a screen that they show you.
And it's numbers that correspond to their entry in their ledger in their database, about what you have a function of all your credits and debits. Now, all we've done is take that ledger that your bank needs to maintain. And every time you make a transaction, they got to talk to the other banks with their Ledger's. And do make sure they change it on each side. That's why it takes so long. And it's so costly, we've been we've taken that process, and we've made it into a open distributed process, where we can all now see the data on that ledger, what my balance is, what my transaction history is, and therefore you know, what I currently have. Right? And so once again, so it's it's numbers on the screen, the difference is that this is crypto, you know, it's cryptographically recorded and unique. So, you know, you probably heard there are only ever 21 million Bitcoins, right? Every bitcoin is an entry on this ledger to just say, you know, here's one Bitcoin, it's in this account. And you know, when you send it to another account, however much you might send, you know, it moves over there. And so it's all just a ledger, whatever the ledger says is the truth, right? Is the single source of truth. Does that does that make sense?
Mike Stohler
What exactly, so you're not really buying something that has where's the worth? In like Bitcoin, so I go to you and say, Okay, I want to buy 10 Bitcoin or Dogecoin or these dog, you know, whatever it is. Why is there value in just this journal entry? file, this number, you know, why what makes it have value?
Shahar Abrams
At the end of the day, what gives any asset value I would say at the very fundamental level is trust people's trust in the asset that it's worth something that it has some use, right? The US Dollar, right doesn't have intrinsic value. Obviously, right, but we all trust that we can use our dollars to pay taxes or to buy goods and services. And so this gives it value. Gold doesn't have also doesn't really have intrinsic value to us, unless you're a very skilled jeweler. And even then, you know, that's probably not the whole worth the whole price of what gold is, right. But we trust that it has value because it's very difficult to counterfeit. And it's very scarce, right? We know, there's only a certain amount of gold. So those things drive the value for these types of assets in with Bitcoin or other crypto assets, it's no different. I would say what gives Bitcoin value is the fact that you can trust it, you can it's and in fact, it's more scarce than gold, right? Because we don't know how much gold there is in the ground. But we all know how much Bitcoin there is at a given point in time, and how much Bitcoin there will ever be right? And we can never make more. And it's actually more difficult to counterfeit, right? It's actually never been successfully counterfeited. And if you know, if someone were able to counterfeit a Bitcoin that would kind of, you know, it would not no longer have value, right? Because that's part of the point you cannot, you cannot counterfeit it, you can't counterfeit some entry on this ledger, right? On your own. Right. And it's incredibly scarce. And it's decentralized, right. So, you know, part of what gives something like the US dollar or another fiat currency trust value, is the fact that we really trust the central institution that's behind it. And with good reason, you know, a lot of the time.
So the United is, you know, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. That sounds pretty good. But if you substitute that with, you know, backed by the full faith and credit of the Government of Zimbabwe, that doesn't sound as good, right. But on the other hand, we what we say, you know, in Bitcoin and crypto is backed by the full faith and credit of math, right. And that's really what we're trusting in at the end of the day, we're trusting in the distributed system, we're trusting and computers all around the world that can be run by anyone to maintain this ledger and protect the security of the network, ie the fact that it can't be counterfeited. And that you can you can use it, right? You can send it to anyone that you want, right? Whether you want to pay for goods and service, or do a remittance, right, or just you want to send money around, right, you you have the ability to do that. permissionless Lee, when we say permissionless, you don't need permission from anyone, right? And it cannot be censored or stopped. Right? So Bitcoin literally is the single most secure record of data that we have ever created in humanity. It's the most immutable secure way of storing data possible, right? Because because of its decentralized nature, and the amount of computing power, right, that that's behind the network as a whole.
Mike Stohler
So it controls this ledger. I mean, who wears sit?
Shahar Abrams
So the ledger is distributed, right? So you can go on a Bitcoin blog is where if you Google Bitcoin block Explorer, or Bitcoin blockchain, you can see an entire record of the ledger, right? You can see every transaction that's ever been made, you can go do that today. Right? Anyone can. And if you wanted to, right, you could download the source code, and actually download the entire ledger, you can sync with the network, and get that ledger from another node, right? And you can see everything. Now, it's important question, right? Who so So you might ask, Well, who gets to maintain this ledger, right? This is kind of what you're asking, but it's very important that the ledger is trustworthy and secure. Otherwise, none of this has value. And so the answer is, anyone can do it. Anyone can download code and which is open source and then get some hardware and become what's called a miner, right, and what what it means to be a miner means that you are participating in validating transactions on the network. So when I use Bitcoin, and I, you know, sent try to send it to someone, I'm broadcasting this transaction over the internet, to the entire network. Now the network of miners, which are running code to listen for these transactions, see my transaction, pick it up, right and then put it package it into a block, write a set of transactions that then gets appended to the ledger cryptographically. Right. Now, in order to do this, write the node before they add transactions to the ledger, they effectively have to prove to the network to all of us that they are trustworthy, that they're acting in the best interest of the network. Right now only, you know, only one miner at a time gets to add transactions to the ledger. And so in order to do that, They have to win what's called, you know, the proof of work, right, which you may have heard before is, you know, proof Bitcoin proof of work Aetherium proof of work, these are the consensus mechanisms that these networks use, right to, you know, decide who can add more transactions and maintain decentralization.
So in order to do that, you know, for what happens in proof of work, which is what Bitcoin uses, right and Aetherium currently uses is, the way that we prove that we're trustworthy to the network is by expending a lot of computing power. And the idea being that if you expand enough computing power, doing this certain calculation that's only really useful in the Bitcoin network, that means that you have invested a lot in the hardware to be able to do those calculations. And thus, you have real skin in the game, right, you have a real stake in this network. So that's where kind of game theory, you know, comes into play.
Mike Stohler
So that's where, like, I've read the newspapers and online, that there are firms that are buying, like these industrial buildings, right, just the mind.
Shahar Abrams
Right. So nowadays, it's very competitive to be a miner on a network like Bitcoin or Aetherium used to be back in, you know, 2012 2013, you could pull up your laptop, and your laptop would have enough hardware to, you know, mine a little bit right mind competitively. Nowadays, you need to be investing 10s of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in hardware and infrastructure, if you really want a shot in mining on the network. Now, if you are a small miner, you still want to mine on your laptop, you can do that. But what you'll do is you'll join a pool of a, you know, a bunch of other people, and some of the largest miners are in fact mining pools that are made up of many different miners spread around the world.
But there is a large capital investment, right, you have to make if you want to be a really big miner, and you have to think about alright, what are my capital costs? And the hardware I'm going to have to buy? How long is that going to be useful for etc? And then what are my your only other input? Is your OP x your energy costs, right? What am I going to pay for energy, because that's all I need to mine, I need energy and I need the hardware, and then I can be anywhere, right? As long as I have an internet connection, and I can contribute to mining on the network. And just to give you an idea of you know, how much this is happening, right? And mining on Bitcoin and proof of work is the process of you know, basically brute forcing a math problem, right, so doing lots of operations again and again on a specific algorithm called Sha 256. And right now, there are around I think the number is, you know, a few quintillion of these operations happening per second on the Bitcoin network per second. So quintillions of hashes per second, every second of every day, right on the Bitcoin network. That's what is behind bitcoin, right? When people have what, what gives it value? Well, that's the security mechanism of it at play.
Mike Stohler
So how are these crypto firms that are mining? How are they making money? Good if they're just mining and keeping this database? What's in it for them? What are they doing?
Shahar Abrams
So, yeah, great question. Why? What incentivizes miners to contribute their computing power to help secure the network like we talked about? And the answer is, the miners actually get rewarded. So when a miner finds a block on Bitcoin or Aetherium, many crypto networks, in fact work the same way. When you when you mine a block, that block includes a reward for the miner, which is a new transaction, would you call it called a Coinbase transaction, they want to get technical, which says Pay me X amount of bitcoin, it's a new transaction, the miner gets to add to the block just once, when they find the block that's known as the block reward. The block reward for Bitcoin started at 50 Bitcoins per block. So it used to be and there's a block around once every 10 minutes in Bitcoin. So it used to be in 2009 2010. Every time you would find a block, you would get 50 Bitcoin as the reward. Now back then Bitcoin wasn't worth much. And what happens is that every around four years, the amount the reward is cut in half. So in 2012, the reward was cut from 50 Bitcoin per block for any miner that finds a block to 25. Then four years later, in 2016, it was cut in half again, from 25 to 12 and a half, and then in May of 2020. Last year, it experienced the third having it's called the halving where now the Bitcoin block reward is 6.25 Bitcoin so now if you mine a block on Bitcoin, which by The way is much harder than it was before ever has been. Your block reward will be 6.25 Bitcoin, if you're able to successfully find the block, and that simultaneously is the supply inflation of the network. So you ask, where does New Bitcoin come from? That's where it comes from.
Mike Stohler
But there's only so much that that can wrap
Shahar Abrams
because every four years it keeps getting cut in half. Yeah, where eventually, the last fraction of a Bitcoin will be mined approximately in the year 2140.
Mike Stohler
Right. Why don't they make it easier? So a block is I'm buying something from you. And I'm paying via crypto, that creates a block. Yeah. Okay. So I don't you know, I don't like to work that much. As far as like the the thinking part white, it seems to be why don't they have crypto block COMM And this is where people do their blocks.
Shahar Abrams
So you know, it's important. Yeah, let me let me try and answer that it's important. You know, when you make a transaction, to send someone Bitcoin or whatever other crypto right that you broadcast, and it gets packaged with other transactions in a block, right? What becomes in the next block, that's okay.
Mike Stohler
So there is somewhere that I'm doing this, I'm not just going to Venmo and sending you crypto and no one else knows about.
Shahar Abrams
Right? So there. So you'll have a separate application like a front end application called a wallet. Okay, I didn't you can wallet, wallet applications are not part of the blockchain, right, anyone can build kind of a front end, right? That just sends transactions to the Bitcoin network. And that's effectively called a wallet. And nowadays, there are really good interfaces, right? For wallets that make it super easy, where you can just put in what you want to send, you'll put in the address you want to send to, you hit send, and the wallet does the rest, right? Some of these wallets in fact, when you hold your crypto in these wallets, they in fact will pay you interest, they'll pay you passive income on your crypto, much like a bank would you know, for your deposits, except like, you know, 10 to 50 times more interest. Right. So, for instance, all of my bitcoin that I hold in my wallet, I earn upwards of 3% per year on all of my Aetherium that I hold in my wallet, I earn upwards of 5% per year on and all of their there another type of crypto coin called stable coins, which are just digital crypto representations of something like a US dollar. So we just take a US dollar and we make a crypto on it. So we can send it on this distributed ledger on crypto rails, right? Those stable coins which you can get for free, right, just convert one to one with US dollars, and they're all regulated, I earn close to 9% per year on just holding stable coins in my crypto wallet.
Mike Stohler
Now, what are the different? It seems like Elon Musk has been talking about different ones, you know, and how Tesla's hooked up and linked with some of them. And you know, these these dodge, coin dodge, you know, so are these just different companies here, there's like corn, the radio,
Shahar Abrams
I describe them as networks, because they're still trying to be decentralized, where they're just open source code, right, that anyone can download and run and start contributing to the network. So much like their miners finding, you know, running hardware to find blocks to add to the Bitcoin Blockchain. The same is true for Litecoin. The same is true for Dogecoin. The same is true for Mineiro. The same is true for Aetherium, etc. Now, the difference is the characteristics of the network. Right. So Dogecoin, you know, has much fewer miners, it has unlimited supply right now. So there's no plan cap supply for Dogecoin I think every day, there are about 14 million Dogecoin being mined, and that'll continue indefinitely. And so, you know, what you have to ask when you're thinking about, you know, which Kryptos to buy, is what network you want to kind of be a part of, and some of the reasons, I think, you know, Bitcoin really stands out in this regard, is you know, it has the most hashing power, right, the largest network effect, I think in crypto now, you know, because we are talking about networks, we're talking about investing in networks. The most important thing is network effect, right? Because the larger the network effect, the more user users there are on the Bitcoin network. The more businesses accept Bitcoin, the more you can do with Bitcoin, right? The more people you can transact it with, the more goods and services you can buy, the more confidence you can have in it as a store of value. So it all comes down to network effect. So you need to ask yourself which crypto networks are going to be the most resilient? Which ones are the strongest and which have the best potential to build strong network effects?
Mike Stohler
Okay. Now, is there a difference between a coin and a token?
Shahar Abrams
Um, not not really, I think it kind of splits hairs. I don't know, if there's like an official definition. Maybe I'm missing but generally those terms are used interchangeably.
Mike Stohler
Okay. I was just curious, because you hear some, some people talk about these tokens. Some people say tokens, tokens or coins like that. So, you know, I think what we're getting out of this is that there's a lot of variables, when you want to learn about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, so it's not like I can just go out and wing it. You know, there's, there's just a lot of different nuances about the different networks in which one because you know, now there's probably 10, or more different types of coins or networks. 1000s 1000s. Okay. So I think the end goal of what we want to talk about is, you know, what you're doing as far as helping people understand these things, you have a website's called Road to Babylon. Tell us a little bit about your website. So and what you guys are doing
Shahar Abrams
it first off, I called it a lot of people ask me like, why the heck is it called Road to Babylon? I named it after a book that was really influential for me called The Richest Man in Babylon, which is just an excellent kind of personal finance book. So that was a lot of my inspiration for kind of how I teach about this stuff from an investment perspective. And yeah, you know, I think you're absolutely right. This is a really complex industry. It's legitimate, you know, everyone gets caught up in the market and the hype and the ups and downs. What I try to impress on people is if you pull back the curtain, there's a lot of value going on. And there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, it's moving very quickly. And most, I think you're also right, that most people jump in and don't really know what they're doing. In fact, 95% of people fall into that category, that they're investing in stuff. In fact, they've never used it, they don't know, a third of you know, what we just talked about in terms of how it works. And in my opinion, that's a recipe for disaster.
Because you're invest, you know, I think anytime you invest in something that you don't understand, it's a recipe for disaster, if you look at any serious investor, all the best investors in the world, the one thing that I'll tell you is they don't invest in things that they don't understand, right, they'll never do it. So I don't want people to be you know, I think it's an incredibly promising space, I think it's a massive investment opportunity, regardless of what type of investor you are. So if you are more aggressive, it's great. If you're more conservative, if you'd like to focus on cash flow, it actually has a lot to offer you there, if you just care about it. From a diversification perspective, it has a lot to offer you there. So my, what I'm endeavoring to do is, you know, just help people navigate all of those decisions, right? By educate by informing them, right? And I'm not going to tell you, you know, Do this, do that, because I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not a fiduciary. But hopefully, I can give you a great idea of how you think about this stuff, how you want to structure your investment, strategy and framework in crypto and, you know, what are all the options and what you can do and all this stuff.
So the best way I decided to do this was to just build a course. And so this is something I've been working on for several months, almost a year. A what I think is a comprehensive tool, kind of investors toolkit course, for crypto is over six hours of content, it may get longer as well. And I you know, it'll be coming out in the next couple of months. So if you're interested in that, you can go over to the website that Mike you mentioned, and there's a section there that says course. So you can click on that and then you'll be able to sign up for, you know, early updates, when when I do release it in the next couple of months. And I think you know, that'll be a great resource for people that are interested. In addition to that I have a lot of free resources on my website, including a newsletter, which I do weekly, which is just you know, kind of my thoughts on what's going on in the market and I mix in some market analysis I mix in some fundamental stuff Some news. And it's really interesting. It's a lot of fun. So I encourage people to check it out if you're interested.
Mike Stohler
And you can also do one on one consultations if,
Shahar Abrams
yeah, for people that, you know, think they're ready to get into it now, or maybe they're already in and they want to get a better idea of a plan or a strategy, I offer one on one consultations, those options are also on my website under Services. And I like to start out, you know, with short consultation, so you know, a free consultation, just to get to know you and see, you know, if I can actually help and add value before I charge you or anything, and then you know, we can we can move forward, or I can just answer some questions, always happy to do that.
Mike Stohler
No, perfect. And, you know, for everybody, it's wrote to babylon.org Yep, says.com. So, make sure you have the.org. And once you're on the website, just like Shahar was saying, you know, at least sign up for his newsletters. It's very easy to do. And, you know, this has been amazing, you know, it's, I it's, it's something that I listen to every day, everyone's talking about this stuff. Yeah. But you know, it's kind of like us back in the 80s, you know, with the whole internet thing, and I'm like, oh, yeah, and I think it's a lot like that, you know, it's to us, it was just like this, you know, what are you talking about, I can go online and do this. And, you know, so it was just, it's a breakthrough.
And for some of us older people, it's like, you know, how can this work? You know, just because we don't understand it, right. And things that you don't understand, you're going to have some type of doubt. But that's why people with your services are so important. It's, you know, that's how it gets out there, you know, to make guys like me little less scared in it, you know, cuz it's like, you know, I've always just, you know, real estate, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and, you know, now there's this whole new thing. That's just blown our minds. So I really appreciate what you're doing. I appreciate that you're giving back and allowing people to, to go on your website and learn. I think that is, it's just phenomenal. Talking about this stuff. I still don't understand it that much. So I may have to sign up for your newsletters also. Just to make sure, but sure, I appreciate you coming on, and taking a few minutes of time just to discuss this.
Shahar Abrams 3 Absolutely. I feel like we could have kept talking for another couple hours. But well,
Mike Stohler
you know, maybe we will have to do a, you know, a second episode. You know, one of these days. Once you get your courses, you know, once things get going, we'll do a part two of this because I think there's just a lot of stuff out there
Shahar Abrams
to talk about, we scratched the surface, but I think we covered you know the really important stuff, frankly about how does it actually work? And the questions you asked are I think that the right place to start for anyone right get really get your head around. What's actually going on? What's the point? You know, why? Why might it have value?
Mike Stohler
Yep, absolutely. So, Shahar, I appreciate it. Hey, everybody rode to babylon.org Thank you. Take care.
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ABOUT SHAHAR ABRAMS
Shahar Abrams is a former blockchain industry professional with experience leading enterprise blockchain deployments at IBM.
He is one of the few people to straddle the “traditional” enterprise blockchain world and the more well-known public-blockchain space also referred to as crypto.
He’s passionate about helping my clients form, plan, and execute effective crypto investment strategies hand-tailored to their personal and financial goals.
He draws on his years of experience as a crypto investor and professional in the blockchain industry (at IBM) to provide on-demand insight and assistance to clients of all backgrounds as they navigate this new and exciting space.