Encouraging Women To Invest In Cryptocurrency With Merri Silverstein

 

Can women invest? Merri Silverstein of BluAngel Investor strongly believes so, and she encourages women to invest in cryptocurrency. She discusses with Halle Eavelyn that it’s not how much money you make. It’s what you do with it and how you invest. In this episode, Merri provides tips on how best to navigate the crypto space. She is guiding women to explore an entirely new way of approaching money, empowering them along the way. Join this conversation to hear the inspiring story of how Merri started in this space and how, this time, the princess is saving herself.

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Encouraging Women To Invest In Cryptocurrency With Merri Silverstein

I am ridiculously excited for this episode because I have here my pal, Merri Silverstein. She has been one of the biggest influences for me of women being in the crypto space. She has been in since the beginning. I have heard her whole story, and I love it. Merri, I would love for you to introduce yourself so that people know, in general, what it is that you do and why you love the space so much.

I have two degrees in the sciences but I do know what you mean, Finance. Back in high school, I was buying what you call IPOs. They are called new issues back then. About 2010, I did inherit a little tiny bit of money, and I started putting some money into stocks. I was naturally attracted to the tech stocks, to things that I thought could grow a lot and be part of our future, partly the cell phones we use. I did fine and finally opened up to what is Bitcoin. When I understood it, I was like, “This is it. This is incredible. This is something that’s going to change the entire world.”

I started to study more coins and ICOs, Initial Coin Offering, there are a lot of things similar like buying stocks, penny stocks, blue chips, and crypto. There are lots of things that are completely different. An IPO is typically offered through an exchange that you are used to buying a platform if you are a stockbroker. Here is a little different. In crypto, you are on your own. We are decentralized.

When I’ve got into crypto, the one thing I saw was that this isn’t just about Bitcoin, Ethereum or the apps they are building on it. This is something that is going to revolutionize every industry and country in the world. This is global as Bitcoin is global. If you are not 100% understanding what Bitcoin is, I would like to give you a quickie that Bitcoin has no owner.

In other words, when you use every app on your phone, there is a CEO to the company, owner, and server where they are backing up all of the data. Bitcoin has none of those. It is what they call open source. Anyone can come and join, people who are developers and work on it. They work through consensus, agree on things, and make changes.

The data is stored inside the crypto, which is cryptography on top of the blockchain. A blockchain is a software that is not new. It has its own ability to create a ledger and store all of the data. You cannot have fake Bitcoin. I cannot pass you a fake Bitcoin because it has to run on the Bitcoin protocol. It won’t move if it is not real.

That is a lot of information but I want to back it up. Merri has been doing this for a long time and came from the stock world to go into crypto. It is not necessary for everybody to be in that position to move into the space that she has been in. I came from a completely different background, zero stocks. I feel exactly as she does that Bitcoin and crypto, in general, are going to change the world or change the world.

It is why I’m here talking to you, guys. That’s important. I want to say that if you have not read some of the earlier episodes that there is some basic information about what blockchain, DeFi, crypto is because that is where we started so that you would feel you had a basis for conversation. Everything that I say is about how does this affects you, the reader, and what are you going to do with it? Why do you care? The reason Merri is here is that I want you to care very much about the fact that as a woman, you are capable of learning an entirely new platform and way of investing or approaching money.

Merri is here to tell the beautiful fairy tale of the good news of the princess saving herself. Merri, I want to talk a little bit about your own personal life and your life journey because that is important for women to learn. A lot of women ended up on their own without anything and can use crypto as a way to reacquire wealth. Can you talk about that?

I myself have been on those journeys. I was working, doing consulting in the medical field. I have worked with several doctors and built businesses there on my own. I was doing the stock on the side in 2010, and I did very well with that. In other words, it is not how much money you make. It is what you do with it and how you invest it.

You can take $50 a week here in crypto, read for half an hour, invest in something, and let it sit the chore or it could flip in a week. You could make a lot of money. It is worth a little bit of time that you can make a lot of money, and you will learn as you are going. You can also always do a practice portfolio, which is like fake money. Invest in that portfolio and see how you are doing.

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I recommended people do that with stocks years ago. You can do it now with crypto. I’m sure there are sites on the internet to do that. You do not have to lose your first $50 but now is a great time. The numbers are down. I’m pretty much sure that anything on the top 20 to 30 is pretty solid. It is going to go up 20% to 50%. It could go up 100% or more.

We were buying into ICOs, which was the Initial Coin Offering, in 2017. There were things that went up 10 times, 100 times, and 1,000 times. There are things that are still going to go up from then. There are things that I bought in 2018 that now people are like, “Do you have this coin? You have to get it.” What I realized is this is technology. One of the differences between the stock market is you are buying a little piece of the technology. You are buying these coins, which are fractional, any amount you want. You do not have to buy the entire Bitcoin.

Let’s talk about the idea of Bitcoin being fractional because your explanations are good.

Now Bitcoin is $37,000 or $64,000, which has been. You do not have to pay that amount of money. You can buy $100 worth. You buy any amount you want of any coin. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 and I have 0.01. It is the same thing and value. If I go to sell it tomorrow, that is the price that I can get for it. It makes it easy for this to be global and all of us to join together all over the world. You do not have to be a billionaire, a millionaire or even have money in the bank. You just need to have an ID in some of the sites in the United States. You can go in, and they will lend you the money. They will lend you $1,000 as Robin Hood does.

As you buy this crypto, it is on that site, and the value goes up. They slowly take that money back. They are not getting any money. You can make $1 million by borrowing the $1,000. There are teenagers that will be happy to tell you their stories. I prefer to tell you, as a woman, how I’ve got here from the women’s side because most teenage girls were not doing that, unfortunately.

I’m trying to get them there but we are getting there. As a woman, you need to believe in yourself. You need to know what you like. Trust your gut as we usually do. Women have the best intuition. Think about things that you like or understand. It is not the stock market where you could say, “I love his clothing company. Can I invest? I love these new supermarkets or cars.” It is more like techie stuff that we are building a brand-new world with.

You may not fully understand it but it’s not hard to find information, read about it or look at it. For example, which you have heard of besides Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Cardano, we have Binance. These are coins on the very top of the market because we go by how much money is invested into these coins. We are talking in the billions of dollars.

Those are what you would relate to the stock market as blue chips. We have what I call a medium price, which might be $0.02. We have things for $2,000 or $200. We have a lot of coins that take $0.02 or $0.01. I call that a medium. We have those real micros, which people are always looking for, the next Shiba. Most people have heard of Shiba. Shiba came out, and you could buy it for Satoshi SATS, which is eight decimal places over. Instead of 0.01, which would be 2 decimal places, it is 8 decimal places.

I’ve got ended about six decimal places. This is at 5 or 4 now. I have made some money off of Shiba Inu or what’s called SHIB. It was named after the dog.

That was invented as a meme coin.

Let’s talk about what a meme coin is first because I haven’t explained that or talked about that on the show yet. I want people to understand that. A meme is one of those graphics that you see that was created for fun. I would say that a meme coin is about the equivalent of that. The coin is created for fun. There is no real purpose or use case for it.

 

Merri, correct me if I’m wrong but a lot of crypto is created to save the world like clean water projects or help girls. There has a new NFT project that is to help Wall Street’s Fearless Girl. The artist is turning that into an NFT. You will be able to buy a portion of that. There has all this crazy stuff out there where everybody is like, “I want to do something good.” Some coins like SHIB and Dogecoin were created for fun and entertainment but they have now got use cases. People are building stuff on them because they’ve got popular. Would you agree with all of that?

Dogecoins are old. When I say old, probably built in 2015 or 2016. It was meant to be a joke. It was not meant to be the best tech, and it was simplistic. It was not going to be better than Ethereum, which is everyone is trying to build better, faster, smoother, limitless transactions per second. Doge was a joke. I met one of the developers several years ago but they were using it out on the West Coast along with Litecoin in places to go buy your lunch. The point of Bitcoin is it is like money. You can use, spend and trade it like gold. It’s something that we can use digitally to barter with.

That is what it was being used for, and it might still be. All of a sudden, when crypto got famous again like in 2021, we had big people coming in like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk. Elon, for some reason, took to Doge. No one was using it. It was this old, boring, not new technology that had no better purpose than anything else we were doing. He could then adapt it like what the ICOs were like.

Let’s say you and I ran a company and an ICO, and we built this crypto coin with this purpose. For some reason, we did not make it. We did not raise enough money. We were not successful, didn’t get marketing, and didn’t hook up at the best companies. We are failing. It does not mean that coin does not exist but it does not mean another company might come along with a lot of money and say, “Can we take all of your coins? Can we buy you out for pennies on the dollar?” I always knew that would happen, and it has happened. That is what happened but for free with Doge.

When Doge, all of a sudden, became this name that people heard of, they felt that they missed out, “I could have that for $0.001. Look what it is at.” All of a sudden, someone got the idea, “Let’s make a new Doge. Let’s make a new doggy. Let’s make the Shiba doggy. It is beautiful.” People went to look this up, and they saw, “I can be a millionaire. I could afford 1 million coins for $15.” People started to buy it. What happens is when everybody likes something, that is the winner and the popular coin.

Shiba came out in the summer of 2020. I would say towards the end of 2021, Shiba caught on so much that every other person was jumping in. It blew up, and its market top. Its value went to $35 billion. That day that they announced it, I looked at my phone to find all my portfolios. I have some Shiba. I do not remember but I bought some. I did 11X or 12X my investment. I did the technique, which is if it flies up fast, sell 80%, leave 20%, let it ride because I will probably never be able to buy it that low again.

You’ve got gold from Merri. If it goes up high, sell 80%, hang on to 20%. That is good. There has been no investment advice ever given on the show but good principle values.

If it’s slow, steady, and solid, I always say, take out about 20% or your initial investment. No matter what, you stay safe. In the case of Shiba, when it blew up like that, I looked at it and had forgotten about it. It had been several years. The money I took out, I divided into 4 and reinvested into 4 different things. Even if only 1 of them goes up 10 times, I still win.

That is how this is because we are dealing with a lot of baby startup companies, although in 2022, they are not going to be babies because such big money is coming in behind them from day one. Those are still companies that are blowing up now. You have heard about the metaverse. Two big points in our space for the metaverse are Decentraland, MANA, and SAND. SAND was started in 2011. Imagine if you invested in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. If you even bought it before 2021, you would be super rich. I bought it several months ago. I’ve got in what I called late in $0.20.

It is still early. At $0.20, that is amazing. The lesson here for everybody is it isn’t ever too late. There are always more coins. There is always more stuff that is coming out. The metaverse is just a word. This is probably the word of the year or something for 2021. All of a sudden, everybody was hearing it. There has been so much powerful stuff. We are going to have a woman in a few more episodes who is doing amazing things in the metaverse. I’ve got introduced to the metaverse physically through the Oculus. I know I’m late to the party for somebody that is in the space but not late to the party from the standpoint of everybody else.

It is technology. When you hear about it, and you don’t see it out there, most of us using it, you do not see it in all the stores, it does not mean it is not happening. It means it is being built. I’ve got my Oculus a few years ago because a bunch of us in crypto wanted to meet online and play some games. We were going to do it with the Oculus so that we felt we were all in the same room together. That was my first experience. My second was at an event I was at. Someone put it over my head, and I was blown away.

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The quality of the graphics is incredible. I thought it was about shooting zombies or whatever. It can be but I went to Muir Woods and did yoga with a woman teaching me yoga. I went to a house that my cousin had built in the metaverse. I was able to stand and look around the stunningly beautiful place and think in terms of having a virtual party here with other people who also had Oculus. We could see the balloon festival in the distance. It was a beautiful environment.

Thanks to Google Maps, I went and stood in front of my mother’s London building as if I were on the street in front of her house. It was that clear as if I were really there. This way, I could see the garbage cans, and up this way, I could see the beautiful, Nodding Hills-style garden square. It was like I was there and all of that inside 1, 2 hours or something in the metaverse. I was like, “I’m utterly hooked.” How long do you think it is going to take before we stop having to wear giant helmets on our heads? It becomes a minority report, and it is in a pair of glasses that we could move around as we wave our hands.

I have stock in companies like that. They have ones for doctors that’s stock I own already that all the information is going by the feed in the glasses. Remember we heard about those Google Glasses years ago that you would be walking down the street but yet you could google things and read it. It could give you direction. All the things you are looking down at your phone when you are walking down the street that you need to know where you are going or what you are getting.

All these things are being built. Yes, the Oculus has not changed in a while. They will become smaller, lighter, easier. That is VR. It was big several years ago. We switched over to AR. In AR, we can try things on like a pair of shoes, online and decide if we want to buy them. I can see this vase, put it on my desk in reality, and decide if I want to buy it without any glasses.

We go back and forth between the two different products. Ones with the glasses and one without, depending on what the product is. Since we had children learning on Zoom for school, we have air coming in there. We have it in shopping. They are using VR to train police officers, firemen, things where they take the real space without it having to be real. It is so much better that way. It is like a video game mixed with the reality of where they used to take them to train them but they could not take them into the real places.

We could use this for the military and in great places but eventually, you know where it all ends up. It ends up in education in school, and it will go all the way down to the children. We can’t put them in these big classes full-time to cover them all up. They have their mask. I was thinking, “How are you going to breathe?” That is why we will perfect it. That is another side of technology. That is why it is so great.

How does blockchain fit in? When you go into the metaverse, your home is going to be built on the blockchain. It is probably going to be an NFT. It is going to be the land, top of your building, your chair but we will have this meeting that you and I are having now in the metaverse, and we can look as perfect as we want. Maybe I will be green and have orange hair.

It is however you want yourself to look and whoever you want to be with. We could meet up but it is down the road. To understand the crypto side is, we are still building the foundations, the plumbing. To me, that is what I like to invest in. When you talk about 1995, the dot-com bubble, those were websites that now could do something. One sold clothing or one sold cars. They came in, they went but HTTPS was the second protocol on the internet, which is what you and I are on now. That is how we connect all over the world. If you notice, the whole world change once we can all connect. That was the third revolution.

Now they are doing that whole idea of Web 3.0. That is the coming wave.

Names are for everyone to hear but it has all been the same plan from day one. This is the fourth revolution. Instead of HTTPS, which is the second protocol for the internet. The first one was AOL, the dial-up and little noises. We are looking to become decentralized. By doing so, we are going to run on the protocols on the blockchain.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano are protocols. We have some other fabulous ones, Solana, Avalanche, that are here, and we have many more coming. Those are the things that I like to study and look at. How good and solid are they? What can they do? They have grown up. They are not just building this layer. They are building a layer, and they are building all the things around it. The best example is called Polkadot. When you look at something like Polkadot Cardano, the first thing you say is, “Who is behind this?”

 

Merri has been talking about some coins. When she talks about Cardano, that is a coin but it is also a platform for developing stuff on, and so is Polkadot. When you are on these platforms, you can buy coins that are associated with it, which will then fund the projects that are being built in whatever the thing is. That may not be true like straight across the board but it’s true of some of the things that you are mentioning.

This is a newer concept. It is not that they are platforms. They are protocols or the base layer. You can only run that coin on that layer but they are building.

That is why I’m calling it a platform. I do not mean it as a technical platform. I mean it literally as a base for. I’m using an English word, not a technical word, and I should have clarified that. Thank you.

Ethereum is the second known crypto coin that was to be better than Bitcoin because if I sent you Bitcoin and I said, “You’ve got it.” “No, I did not.” “I sent it to you.” We never receipt. We could not prove it. When we built Ethereum, we put in something called a smart contract. We put it into the Etherscan on the internet, where I can click on my wallet. My wallet shows it went to your wallet, and now I can prove it.

I went through that. I was in the middle of doing my first IDO. The initial coin offerings are now called Initials Dex Offerings but I was doing my first one. There were twelve hoops to jump through. On hoop number twelve, there was some glitch, and I did not get it. I wrote to them and said, “Where are my tokens? I did not get it.” They said, “Send us the proof and the transaction.”

I was able to go in and send it to them. They were able to look at it and go, “Here is where the glitch happened. Here is where the thing went wrong. Here is why that happened. We are sorry, you are out of luck.” That was funny but I learned a lot doing it. I loved that you could track it. It was all every little bit of information in my entire wallet and where it was going, the time that it had happened, the date that it had happened. All of that is happening automatically being generated by the system itself.

We have Ethereum, which was the first protocol. From Ethereum, it was 30 men. From there, zero women. I find it interesting because everything is new, I like to look at who our developer is. What is the purpose of the coin? Let me look at the technology. When I talk about Cardano and Polkadot, both of the men who started those two protocols, which you can trade as a coin, are from Ethereum.

Anyone that comes to Ethereum is super brilliant, has a purpose, and knows what they are looking for. Everyone is looking to take what exists and make it better. The designer of Cardano, Charles, said, “I can do better than Ethereum.” That is what he wants to do. Gavin Wood, who made Polkadot said, “I can make this open-source. We are going to invent a whole new system and create all the things that I feel are missing from Ethereum.”

When Ethereum was around, and we started to do these ICOs, they were random. They are something you would hear about. You had to go to their website and send them some Ethereum. You would invest, and who knew? After a while, it became like, “These were scams. They were not good. People lost money.” We can make a mistake like you did where you sent it to the wrong place or something happens.

Polkadot is one of the platforms solving that problem, where they are going to have these IDOs, and you get Polka starter coins, and you have to white list yourself, which is sign up and involved. It is almost like a lottery, and you may not get picked. There has also a limit to how much they let you put in. You can’t lose your whole $10,000. They are only raising a few hundred thousand dollars for the most. They are not raising millions.

When a team is building something, and they raise $500,000, that is not that much money but it is enough for them to sit around on computers and build things. It is not for them to go on $1 million trips, burn the money or vanish. It is much more contained and controlled. The only point of that is that we can feel it is a little bit vetted and safer. Therefore, it can become more mainstream because the public does not want to get involved with it. They are afraid it was a scam.

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We are working towards the way of what I’m sure governments would like to see. When you get regulated, especially by the United States, you are moving up to the level where we can allow the masses to invest and Wall Street to come in. They have been blocked because no one understood all of this and whether or not it was a scam or it was brilliant technology where you could make money. There have been both.

We see a lot less of us getting down because there is a lot of vetting. It’s because Polkadot came up with this, a lot of others can quickly jump into these things and build them also. Binance, the most successful ICO to date, in their first quarter of 2018 to $2 billion, the same as Georgia Bank, they also have created a platform for this. They are an exchange where you can go and buy your coins. There are finances around the world like Coinbase.

Sisi, the man who invented this, does not want you to get hurt, hacked and does not want anything bad to happen. He tries to learn about everything new and keeps adding that to what he has. He tries to make it as safe as possible to go on a site. He has his own wallet called a Trust Wallet. It is up there with Metamask. It is a very good wallet. These are hot wallets.

A hot wallet is something that is connected to the internet, and a cold wallet is something that you can keep in our cold storage or whatever is something you can keep. It is a little stick, and you can keep it in a drawer. Nobody can steal your coins because they can’t get your wallet. It is what is called cold storage versus hot storage. I wanted to clear that up. I want to say one thing about Cardano because I learned something new about Cardano that I love. Cardano’s ticker, the coin itself is called ADA. Everybody always goes A.D.A. but it is not. It is ADA because it is from Ada Lovelace. She was Henry Lord Byron’s daughter.

You are talking about Lord Byron. She was his daughter. Her moniker is now like the first computer programmer because she was working with more sophisticated, I want to call it adding machines. What I mean was there was a machine in the 1800s that was starting to do calculations. She wrote the first program to go on this calculation computer.

The first code was written by this woman, Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. That is what they named ADA, which is the Cardano coin after. When I found this out, I went out and bought Cardano. I doubled my money. I moved it somewhere else. I was like, “I have to get back into this and stay because this is awesome.” I love that they were honoring a woman in the space.

You were one of the first people that I met in crypto, and I was immediately like, “I have to know this woman. She is so amazing and doing such incredible things.” You have such comprehensive knowledge. It goes so much deeper than we could get into. I apologize for that. What you do is important. Please tell people where they can follow you, and get information about you. Where can they know about the amazing Merri Silverstein?

I have a website. It is BluAngelInvestor.com. I’m on Twitter under, @BluAngelMerri. I had spoken at conferences. I have been to hundreds of conferences. In the back rooms, I’m talking to everyone about projects, developers, what we are doing, where we are going about the space itself in the future because to me, there is nothing more important, and this is the most exciting thing.

Through there, I learned anything and everything. Like everyone else, I have made my mistakes and sent something to the wrong address. That is why we say it is great to practice things. Start out small. If you are going to send $20,000 somewhere, send $10 or $50 first, test it, make sure it gets there. There is nothing I can’t teach you about the security side of this because I’m sure I have done all of this myself. It has not pretty much everyone in this space, and a lot of people were hacked.

We are saying, “Hot wallets, cold wallets.” I also like something in between. For example, you take an old cell phone. You can put this Hotness app on there where you are going to use a wallet, and then you take the cell phone and turn it off. It is now not on the internet, and it is in your drawer. I love using those because sometimes these apps are a lot more user-friendly and easier than a cold wallet.

If you want to work your way to it, and you only have $4,100 total in there, it is not going to change your life if it was hacked or something but sometimes it is good. The other advantage is that a huge part of this industry now is collecting large interest, otherwise known as staking. If you use an app like Voyager or Celsius, you can put your crypto in there and get as high as 12%.

 

Polkadot, I am getting 12% at the moment. I’m getting 9% on USDC, which is a $1 coin. It never changes the value. It is a stable coin, a dollar for a dollar. Is your money in the bank getting 9%? Once I found that I said, “I have to think about it. I’m going to send some money over, and let’s collect 9%.” In 2021, I made more interest than I have ever made in my life in one year.

We are going to talk about staking in other episodes but I certainly understand how important it is. You may have caught an earlier episode of this show with Keri Norley. We were talking about staking there because that is something that she does for a living. She teaches about it as well. I bought a Crypto.com coin, which is CRO is the ticker for that. I immediately staked it. This is interesting, I bought CRO on Crypto.com through their app. Staking it was like, “Do you want to stake this?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you want to stake all of it?” “Yes, I do.” “Bye.” That was it. I was done. That was how easy they made it because you are staking on their app.

That is where I would want people to start if they want to do this. You can do that right in the Trust Wallet also.

What would you say a Trust Wallet is?

It was built by Binance, which is a large exchange. In there, they are swapping, staking and it immediately will hook you directly in DeFi itself. As opposed to Metamask, you have to go into a browser and connect the two. This connects it for you. It is a little easier.

If you are reading this and you are like, “It sounds interesting but it sounds complicated, confusing, and I’m not sure,” you can hire Merri to help you figure stuff out. You can look up any search term that we are talking about. There is a lot of information online. The objective of Goddess Of Crypto is not to go into the hardcore, like step by step to stake.

For example, Merri gave you gold, where can you earn 9% on your money, in your bank? No. In the crypto space? Yes. USDT or USDC are the two basic stable coins that are tagged to the US dollar. You are taking dollar for dollar like you are taking your $10,000. Instead of keeping it in the bank where they are like, “You only give us $10,000. We are going to give you 0.0025% interest or nothing. We charge you $25 for keeping your money there every single month or whatever.” Now you can go over to the crypto space, and you can earn real interest in it.

It’s because it is a stable coin, it does not fluctuate. It is pegged to the dollar. If the dollar is worth whatever it is worth, the crypto is still worth $1. There are all these different concepts but what is important for you to get here always is Merri and Halle are doing this. Merri is doing this at a completely different level than Halle is doing this admittedly but when are you going to get started? When are you going to make your choice to go in and make this a part of your investment portfolio?

Do not necessarily do what I did. I liquidated my stock portfolio and went all-in on crypto because I think it is the future. I have evangelized the future because I believe in it. That is my choice. Maybe your choice is different. Maybe you are going to do $50 a week and do what is called the DCA, your Dollar-Cost Averaging. You are putting your money in $50 a week or whatever. It does not matter, whether Bitcoin is at $34,000 for $64,000. You are just taking your $50 in a week. It does not matter what you do. It matters that you make a choice to do something that feels good.

This is not for the makeup part. The stock market in this is parallel but it is extremely volatile. They are very big highs. What happens from highs or lows. We often go on a cycle. You are going to see it all of a sudden. In one week, you can four times your money but the answer is, “No, it is going higher.” You must always take profits and try to be careful with the money you are putting in yourself. If you were to lose, you would only lose the profit money, not your original investment. Always be careful, and you have to be able to stomach this.

A lot of people are very happy, making 4% interest or 10% a year, and feeling safe. A lot of people prefer real estate and find that a safer investment but yet you saw it crash in 2020 and blow up again. In crypto, everything has cycles, the stock market or dollar. Crypto has the biggest cycle there is. This is where you can make insane money. It can all crash back down. Typically, when it is down like it has been at the beginning of 2022, it is back to where it was several months ago. It is not like it is down to zero.

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If you came in a few months ago, and it was huge and you did not take some profits, it is only back to there. You should not be down unless you buy in the high. Rule one, buy low, sell high. However, FOMO creates this thing where everybody starts buying when it is big. We have these memes, and we laugh. Bitcoin at $37,000, which it is now, and it is down. Bitcoin at $64,000, everybody is in.

Try to think of what I’m saying here. Look for the bargain or the thing that is on sale. That is when I go shopping. We call it, even in the stock market, buy the dip. I was always this person in stocks. If the price was $20 of stock and I loved it, I put in my order for $19.50. I’m not paying $20. I want a deal, and everything moves. Even if it is a split second, it does this even in crypto.

I will tell you that the simplest and easiest place to do this again is Coinbase has two sides, the blue, and the black. You can slide your money across for free or you can work in the black. You can start in the blue. The fees are higher. When you go to the black, you can buy it at market price or you can put a sell or buy order. Therefore you can get your price, and you pay a much smaller fee.

Coinbase is also a place that is legit by the US to leave your crypto if you choose to do so. It is your choice to leave things on an exchange or to hold it yourself in your own wallet. Crypto was invented for you to be your own bank and have your own freedom over your own money, theoretically or investment.

The future will be, believe it or not, that crypto will be traded on secondary exchanges with stock, with real estate that is fractionalized, with investments of pieces of art. Everything in the world that we call an investment or security will eventually all trade together in one place globally. The United States government needs to fully understand this, approve it and make sure that we are safe. These things take a lot of time.

I have had to study a lot of regulations, the SEC, how and why they make these decisions because if they do not fully understand you, what is wrong with them? When you fully understand that, you see the whole process. To me, that is the most exciting thing. When you go into an IPO or you invest in companies early, they say, “Are you an accredited investor? Do you have a history of this? Are you worth X amount of dollars?” We have laws to protect you but the person who only has $50 can always get in.

This is where it started here in crypto, where I can buy $50 a big plane, flip it next week for $70 or sit on it for years and watch it multiply thousands of percent, which Bitcoin is up over 10,000% in several years. There is no better investment in past history. Nothing has ever gone up like that, not gold and stock. The dollar, fiat, in any country, only goes one way.

You can study it in some countries and sometimes it’s going to do okay. In general, if you look at money over 50 to 100 years, it is only doing this. In several years, Bitcoin has been going down. It is like a rollercoaster. Take profits. Here is another word, never buy anything you don’t understand. If you do not know what it is, do not buy it just because your friend says, “Buy it.” Stop for five minutes, google it, go on their website, put it in your mind.

It is interesting because you gave us a whole history here like Cardano was ADA. People might want and look a little into that but there are all these coins that are very interesting, have phenomenal backgrounds of people in them, and a purpose. I want to be better because I want to fix this problem.  Some of them are speed and how smooth is it? What happens is the developers are the people to look at.

When they all were building on Ethereum, they liked it. All of a sudden, other protocols came along. One of the keys to knowing which one to invest in is where those developers are running? They are all like this one. They find it so easy to get on and build these new apps. They are from all over the world and are building these types. Those are the things you want to understand and look at. This information is not private.

Medium has tons of things. You can look me up there. I have written articles that are great for beginning women. That is who my articles were for. It is titled Women Can Make Money in Crypto. Don’t Let The Men Make All The Money and it to come into crypto. It was how I felt when I first understood Bitcoin. I love when women read this, and I can say, even though it is a five-minute read, break it in half if you want.

 

There is a lot in there in five minutes. It was emotionally how I felt. The men have all these videos and talk every day. It is all charts and numbers. There has no emotion, though. They do not show any emotion. Us women are picky. We want to like it. We want to know what it is, which is good. We feel a connection. That is how I am.

Anything that is good for every person on this planet is something I support. If it is good for women, I support it even more. If it is to invest and for people to make money, especially if they are not billionaires, I support it even more. That is why, like you, talk to women, explain things to women and connect. Once we connect, you will understand what I’m saying.

The men do not speak the way we do. They are not interested, and they have no emotion. Men have said to me, “I will Invest.” I said, “Let me tell you about this thing.” “I’m not interested. I want to make money. We do not care what it is.” I could never do that. I would never say that. What if it was some horrible thing and it could hurt people? It is dangerous and not safe.

I am saying is please be careful. This is highly volatile. You can make 1,000 times what you put in but always take some profits, take some money back, take your time. It is not super complicated if you want to keep it easy. You can go to Coinbase, go to Voyager, go to Crypto.com, which is an all-in app. You can buy some. If you are buying a few thousand dollars, you are going to put it 2FA on that. You do not have to go cold if you do not like leaving your phone.

I’m not using the text where they are going to text you. That is what a lot of websites do now. They will text you a code, and you put it in. I mean using an app that changes. That is something that has not been hot. That is safe. You might put that on something that is not on the internet. Maybe you keep it to an iPad but you go to your phone to get in. If you break it down like that, you will be safer. The last piece of advice I would give you to be safe is that for $5 a month, you can put a VPN on your computer, on your phone or anything that you go into the internet with where you are dealing with crypto.

A VPN is something where it hides and masks where the signal is coming from. If somebody is trying to hack into your system, it does not give your actual IP address. That keeps you safe as well.

If you were a billionaire or $1 billion dollars or crypto, you would also use that. They can’t find your location to come, get you or even force you but you do not want someone to crack into your internet in your home. If you are in public, in Starbucks, and you are using that internet, you need to use a VPN. You can very easily get hacked while you are sitting there because it is an open a Wi-Fi system.

I use Nord VPN. Merri, we could talk about this forever but this is all the time we have. I’m so grateful to you for coming on the show. Thank you. If you liked this show, even if it confused you or even if you felt this is like a lot of information, that is okay. You can read it again. That is why it is here, but please like the show, subscribe, leave your comments, go to the blog. You can leave comments there as well.

If you shared this with one woman, you would be doing that woman a huge favor because that woman would teach you the way that Merri has taught me a lot of the stuff that I have learned. One of the things that Merri taught me that I love so much is being fearless about doing the investing because Merri said, “I did this, and I tried it.” If you share that with one woman, that is what she learns. They told two friends, and then the whole world knows. Please do that, like, and share. Thank you so much for being here, Merri. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

• Merri Silverstein
• Decentraland
• Oculus
• Solana
• Avalanche
• Polkadot
• Etherscan
• Coinbase
• Trust Wallet
• Metamask
• @BluAngelMerri – Twitter
• Voyager
• Celsius
• Crypto.com
• Medium
• Women Can Make Money in Crypto. Don’t Let The Men Make All The Money – Article
• Nord VPN
• Blog

 

About Merri Silverstein