I had a message from a visitor recently that said they thought this site was pretty good except the crypto posts I made kind of scared them off. The exact quote was “The only thing that made me apprehensive is your posts about cryptocurrency; in my head, it’s kind of the same thing as NFT’s.”

I really welcomed this because it gives me a chance to explain what the true purpose of decentralized finance is. It’s not about scamming people with wash traded worthless meme NFT’s, and not about timing your buying to get as rich as possible. So I want to be clear about what I do, and recommend doing with crypto.

Did you know that your bank account can be frozen? Like seriously, frozen, by a government, creditor, or the bank itself? First, with the government, you may trust them but when they insure all of our deposits in a central bank, that means they can also freeze your money too. Imagine another 2008 financial crisis, but instead of the federal government being $10 trillion in debt, it is $40 trillion in debt. Tack onto that spiraling inflation, huge job losses due to AI, unsustainable private debt, rapidly increasing defaults, and a housing bubble that is on the verge of popping, and we would have a complete disaster. This will cause bank runs, bankruptcies, and leave no one to bail it out except an already overleveraged Fed. Just look at what happened in the countries Greece and Cyprus in 2009-2013, or study a little about the banks during the great depression in America in the 1930’s. It’s due to happen again.

What if there is a creditor, or a legal investigation into your accounts? I actually had this happen about 15 years ago. My accounts were linked to fraudulent transactions because I had been hacked and money was spent without my knowledge. I completely lost control of my accounts during the review for a couple weeks. Fortunately, at the time, I had a secondary account at another bank with enough money to keep my family afloat for the weeks I couldn’t access our money in the bank. In the end, all did get resolved thankfully and I was shown to have not engaged in any nefarious activities, but it left some serious questions in my mind. What if I didn’t have a backup bank account? What if I did and that account was also frozen?

So, once I became familiar with cryptocurrency, I saw it as a protection against this type of problem. Sure, cash is great to have, and I do have some cash in my home safe, but what if that isn’t enough? That’s when, about 7 years ago, I opened a coinbase account and bought some crypto. Now, I know that those funds could be frozen at anytime too, so I leave it empty and keep my crypto spread out among a few different hot wallets. My suggestions on these are Metamask and Phantom, just FYI. Now, the reason I split between cash and crypto is simple. Cryptocurrencies usually have a limited supply. I’m not talking about the shitcoins like Shiba Inu and Pepe. I mean the actual currencies like Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero, and Litecoin. These are deflationary by nature, and have proven to survive massive inflation and come out far ahead of the dollar. That’s why I split between the two.

I can send the cryptocurrency to multiple exchanges to pay bills, or get cash, whenever I need to. Most centralized exchanges (Etoro, Robinhood, Coinbase, OKC, etc) offer debit cards. If things ever go sideways with my bank, I can send crypto from one of my wallets to one of my family member’s accounts on those exchanges that we have setup, and pay whatever bill we need to pay.

I don’t go for the hype and hoohah about crypto making me rich, I missed that boat 15 years ago. However, I do believe in having some of my money de-banked at all times. It doesn’t have to be much, just enough funds to last a month or so in cash, and enough to last a month or 2 in crypto.

So to explain fully, I am not a crypto moonbot or shill. I just like having more control over my money.

Best wishes, and party on!