#123 From Losing $250K to Building a Crypto Education Business with Stewart Crown

Stewart Crown
[Speaker 2] (0:02 - 1:11)
Welcome to the Crypto Podcast, you can find all our episodes on thecryptopodcast.org. My guest today watched 250,000, and when I'm talking in dollars, it's Australian dollars, in his own portfolio collapsed to 23,000. And instead of quitting, he built a 4 million client results business, teaching other people not to make the same mistakes.

Stuart Crone is a trader, coach and RG146 certified educator who dropped out of school, walked out of a corporate job mid-shift and never looked back. Over 12 years he's lived through every major crypto market cycle and now teaches a 7 income streams framework to help ordinary people build wealth without the guru hype. As he puts it himself, he'd rather lose everything than feel like he was worth nothing.

So let's get into it, Stuart. No worries. Thanks for having me, Roy.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, no problem at all. No problem at all.

So I suppose we have to kind of learn your journey first, but that's kind of your crypto, when did that kind of first appear in your radar?

[Speaker 1] (1:12 - 5:40)
Yeah, so I had a friend show up at my house one day, it was about 7.30 at night, and this is in the start of 2013, it was around March 2013. And he said to me, have you heard about the eBay for drugs? I said, what are you talking about?

I just watched a news article about this Silk Road on dark web, you need a certain browser. So I was like, let's have a look at this. And I said, how do you pay for these things?

Because cash is tracked, PayPal's tracked, everything's tracked, what do you use to pay for it? He said, you use this digital currency called Bitcoin. Now I couldn't make heads or tails, I knew nothing at this point.

So I was like, okay, I can see the government shutting this down, but what is this currency they're using? And that's when I started to learn, oh, you can mine it with your own computer, you can do what you want, you can trade, you can hold the value. And I went, now if I can make my own money, especially I've got a computer that can run, that can mine Bitcoin, I can print my own money.

Now, I didn't know at this time that mining computers or using computers to mine Bitcoin was probably not the most efficient way using a CPU rather than a GPU at the time, because I hadn't made ASIC miners yet. I was using a CPU and I was probably making about 20 cents a day. And I was selling it off at the time.

Now, that 20 cents a day would be worth about $33,000 each in today's standards. But that's what started my journey. I started learning about how to mine it, how it's created.

And then I started my investment journey after I got made redundant from a factory job, actually, of all things. I was paid $9,000. And I went and put it all on Bitcoin at $151 Australian a coin.

And I didn't know what I was doing. I made some mistakes. I managed to hold most of it till 2017.

And that's when I made about $750,000. And I pulled some money out, bought a house, had a young family starting, beautiful daughter on the way. And I bought a house.

And then I watched $250,000 slowly dwindle, because I had no concept of what market cycles were. I thought at this point, it can just keep going up forever. But how wrong I was in doing that.

And I then went, all right, well, you've lost a lot of money, more money than you're probably going to make in a year under your educational standards. So you need to learn how to not just make money in an uptrend market. You need to learn how to make money in a downtrend market.

And that started me on my perpetuals and futures journey. In 2021, I learned that I became profitable within three years. And then in 2021, as I said, you mentioned, I walked out mid-shift.

I did. I'd made my friends and myself a large sum of money around the $500,000 market a month and a half. And I turned around and went, I can't do this anymore.

I can't do this cage, this cubicle, this data entry, this workplace, this company. And I got to do what every single, I think that's what most Australians want to do, or most people in the world want to do. I got to go and tell my boss to get stuffed.

And I walked home and geez, I was nervous. I was seriously, seriously, what have I done? Should I be doing this?

Can I do this? All those sort of scenarios went through my head and I just did it. I used Nike's motto and just do it.

And here we are four years later after that and millions made by customers. A lot of people's lives changed. I've grown as a person and I get to live the life I always wanted.

Like currently I'm in far North Queensland, just off the Great Barrier Reef. Two weeks ago, I was in Bali and a week before that, I was living in Thailand. So you never know where I'm going to be.

And that's the beauty of my life now is it's free. I can be where I want, when I want. And learning that skill over the past 10 years of being in crypto and watching it evolve has really, really made me into the man I am today.

I was a boy who walked in, I'm a man who now helps people. And that's the way I sort of see my journey and how it works. Obviously there's other adversity in there.

There's always, there's a girl, there's always a girl in the adversity side of things. And yeah, those are the struggles. Like I said, my own self-worth was a bit of one when I was like, can I do this?

How do I do this? Am I worthy enough of doing this? And here we are now on a global podcast tour around the world, talking to people like yourself, Roy.

[Speaker 2] (5:42 - 5:54)
I'd like to get into the kind of psychology of when you saw your money dropping, what you went through and how you kind of teach people not to kind of go through that fair process when it's happening? Because I mean, the markets are constantly fluctuating.

[Speaker 1] (5:55 - 7:25)
Yeah. So, well, and I've noticed this in myself and people I've dealt with throughout, you know, teaching and so forth is that when someone gets scammed, you go through the same process. If it's a large sum of money, you go through the same process of grief, of loss of a loved one, because you understand the energy, the time, the effort, the sacrifice that went into getting that money.

And when you feel like you're losing a large sum of money and it's just going in thin air and you don't know why, you go through the stages of grief. You know, you're angry, you're accepting, you're bargaining. It's the same process.

So I try and teach people like, okay, this is what's going to happen. How are you going to feel? You need to do this.

Or, you know, like your self-worth, you're going to be very angry. I need you to be kind to yourself because this is not your fault. There is a gap in knowledge.

Yes, it is an expensive mistake. It's one mistake you'll never make again. Depending on the circumstance in which people have lost money, if it's just holding it into a bear cycle, that's one thing.

But if it's someone who's, say, been scammed a lot of money, which I've helped recover funds for people, and sometimes I have to tell them I can't recover it, they go through those stages of grief. And it's actually fascinating to see with people. They will go through depression, they will come back out, they will be angry, they will try and bargain, then they'll have acceptance, and then they'll move on with their life.

So teaching them that that's the process, that's all you need to do.

[Speaker 2] (7:26 - 7:45)
Yeah. I mean, I got wiped out with the property thing and that's exactly the cycle that you go through. So I think it's fantastic that you're teaching people.

You said when people are scammed, you were able to retrieve it. How did you manage to do that? Because there's so many people, even people that I've got on that are doing businesses, most of them got scammed at some stage.

[Speaker 1] (7:46 - 9:26)
Yeah. So obviously we know if we send crypto to one wallet, it's unretraceable. I can't retract it.

Once it's sent to that wallet, I can't get it back. I'm pretty well staffed in that sense. So they're the people I do have to say, look, if this is the process you've done, unfortunately there's nothing I can do.

We see people, what will happen is their identities will get stolen. They'll get the banking details of them. They'll log into their banking details.

They'll transfer, they'll set up a Binance account or a crypto exchange account. They'll send all the life savings over to Binance, turn it into crypto and then send it to an external wallet. Now, there's not much that can be done in that sense because you have to prove that you didn't do that.

And it's very difficult as far as the bank's concerned, they fulfilled what you've asked them. You want to move your life savings over here? No worries, we'll move it over for you.

Binance or whatever crypto exchange, feel like they've done the right thing by you. No, we've given you the crypto and we've sent it off to the wallet address of your choosing. So as far as they're concerned, they've done nothing wrong and nothing has happened that is wrong.

Other people who've sent to, as I said, sent to another wallet address, they're the people I say I can't. The ones that I can recover, a lot of the time when I say recovery, there's two ways I try and scam the scammer. Once I find and establish a scammer, I'll try and bait them into getting that money back for the client.

Or a lot of the time you'll find people, when I say recovery, it's more just, this is percentage of it is, they've more just misplaced it on their MetaMask on the Binance chain. They're looking at Ethereum chain, but it's the Binance chain and they've just don't know how to look at that RPC.

[Speaker 2] (9:31 - 9:47)
I'm working with a company now and they're helping people that forget their seed phase. Sometimes they'll put in some of the words, but they won't put one because they'll think I'll remember it and they don't. And they're getting like 85% success rate on that for people.

[Speaker 1] (9:48 - 10:21)
Yeah. Okay. Cool.

That's really interesting. Yeah. I'll definitely read up more on that because we need more recovery standards within the space.

There's operators out there now. And if you are someone out there that has lost a lot of money in crypto, I'd advise if you are looking at a recovery service, do your due diligence, do everything you can to dox them, understand who they are. There are a lot of people out there that will say, yeah, we can do it.

How much you lost? 150 grand? No worries.

We'll just take 10%. We need that payment upfront. Oh, and by the way, there's no certainty that we'll be able to recover it.

[Speaker 2] (10:21 - 10:37)
Yeah. The company that I'm working with now, they don't do that. They're taking 25% of the first 10,000 and then 20% of the rest, but there's no upfront money and they're highly regulated.

So I wouldn't get involved with them.

[Speaker 1] (10:38 - 10:43)
Yeah. No, definitely. I'm just sort of warning the people out there because that sounds like that's what they do.

[Speaker 2] (10:43 - 11:05)
That's what they do. That's exactly how they do it. And the worst thing is a lot of people, they go out and they post about being scammed and that's like putting a red flag because these scammers are checking for that and they go, okay, he got caught once and they catch him again and again and again.

So again, the best thing is as much as it hurts you and you want to vent, don't post it on social media.

[Speaker 1] (11:06 - 12:19)
Don't say a word. You know, like I've had it happen to me. It was many years ago.

Around that time, I lost some money, you know, gave someone some money to trade for me. And what do you know? He lost the wallet keys to the hard drive.

And there was at the time 724 Bitcoin in that fund. Now it wasn't worth what it was today. And I only at the time had about 1.5 Bitcoin in that investment, but that's when Bitcoin was $1,580 a coin. So it was about $2,000 in there. Bitcoin and a half today, geez, I really would like that money back. So Jonathan Weltman, if you're out there, mate, give us a call.

But yeah, look, they're the nasties. And just in general on scams, not just recovery scams and so forth, there's a lot of nasties out there. Do your due diligence.

Come and talk to people like me. We're very open. We put our booking links up online.

Come and book a link. Say hello. Talk to the person, not just some voice over the phone or a WhatsApp or a Telegram.

Come and jump on a Zoom or a video call. Meet the person. Ask them where they live.

I'm very, very transparent about who I am. And if anyone wants to come have a chat, they can.

[Speaker 2] (12:21 - 12:42)
Take us through your process, because I know that you've got good success rate for some of the students. So can you take us through how you're doing things? And I mean, obviously, you can tell us the best results, but maybe more average as well, because everyone can tell, you know, it's like me saying, you know, the podcast coaches, oh, I got him into the 0.5%, but it doesn't mean that everybody gets into the 0.5%. Yeah, that's right.

[Speaker 1] (12:42 - 16:00)
So how do I bring them on? Well, it depends on what their level is. So I've obviously got the anomalies and so forth.

Turn that off. The anomalies and so forth that sit out there that are, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, all that sort of stuff. There's about five of them.

People have got really good success. Oh, on the average, let's say two types of people. One, they're the experienced trader, understand crypto to an intermediate level, but they're having a little bit of trouble moving to that next level.

A lot of the time when I get on with those experienced traders, it's literally just reviewing what they're doing, tweaking a couple of things that I know would suit their lifestyle better, because I've been around the traps for eight years now. And a lot of the time, that's my success right there. You'll see a 20% growth in the first month of your trading profitability just due to a couple of little tweaks.

It's having a new set of eyes, really, just over old work. Now, the second type of person is the newbie. I've seen all these clickbait images online, and I want to become a part of this, and I want to learn.

So once they come on board, I will start with the bare bone basics. How do we set up an exchange? How do we buy it?

Okay, now we've bought it. We've got skin in the game. Let's learn about it, because I've always said, learn about the technology, and the money will come.

That's the biggest thing I can say to anybody out there, is don't come running to crypto for the money. Come running for the technology. It's the technology.

Like Jeff Bezos says, only invest in companies that solve a problem. The same thing applies with crypto. Only invest in cryptos that solve a problem, and come for the ones that do solve a problem, like Bitcoin.

Everyone goes, what problem does it solve? It's not smart contract. It can't be programmed.

So what problem does it solve? I say it's a store of wealth. It's a solid store of wealth that you can keep money in there and hold for long durations of time without worrying about too much oversight.

So that's the process I teach them, and once we get into that, that's when we start, okay, this is how you're going to make money. We've got DeFi. We've got staking.

We've got leverage trading. We've got spot trading. We've got algorithmic trading.

It comes down to, let's trial each one for a week. Which one did you like the most? I really liked perpetual trading.

That's what we focus on, and that's what I'll teach them. So I need to find in a client, not just, hey, I've got a one program fits all scenario. It's very much, I need to find out, one, what their job is, two, what their lifestyle habits are, and three, how can I as quickly as possible get them to where their goal is?

And that's the way I look at it. So I'm always moving with a certain amount of intent with me. Obviously, sometimes more than others, if you see my face when I'm walking, but in saying that is that I do it with the expectation of helping that person get to their goal because everyone says to me, if you make so much money, why are you doing this?

Why are you teaching people? And I said, God taught me the way out so that when I came back to get yous, I could point you in the right direction. And they go, okay, so you're here to help people.

Very much so. If I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't.

[Speaker 2] (16:02 - 16:29)
You were lucky. I know you saw your money drop a lot, but you bought a house, you took it out. I mean, the reality is, if you didn't do that, it would have been, you're probably crying a lot longer.

What are you teaching? Because I see some people, and they have strategies when it gets to a certain level, take out 25%, then the next day, and there's different strategies for taking out a percentage. And then I've other people, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold.

What's yours?

[Speaker 1] (16:29 - 17:50)
Yeah. Look, I do both. That's the simplicity on it, is I do both.

And I manage them separate to the other. So I will hold, I look at coins of what's a low risk, what's a medium risk, what's a high risk. In other words, what am I going to hold for 10 years?

What am I going to hold for five? And what am I going to hold for 18 months? Now, obviously, 10 years is your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, your five years is your XRP, your algo, or some of your top altcoins.

And then we fall down to, you know, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Pepe, SHIB, all those other coins. I don't want to be holding on to them for too long. They are not solving a problem.

They are creating one in my eyes. So in saying that, walking through that process and looking at, you know, what coins should I buy or where should I go? Always break it down into, if I'm investing, I'm investing.

If I'm trading, I'm trading. Use your investment mindset for your investing. Use your trader's mindset or the gambler's mind, if you will, for your trading.

That way, if you keep them separate, if you mix them and you're having a bad run on one, it's going to hurt the other. So you keep them separate. And that way, you're able to monitor them and see their overall growth over time.

[Speaker 2] (17:53 - 18:03)
And like the Bitcoin and Ethereum and stuff like that, when you're holding stuff, you're then making it work for you as well, instead of just speculating?

[Speaker 1] (18:03 - 19:43)
Yeah. So depending on what coin it is and how large, as I said, I'll keep a portfolio for holding over time that I don't touch. I just dollar cost average, the investor's mindset onto it and just allow it to grow over time.

And then I've got an accounts for trading where I'll move, you know, money into leverage trading, or I will take that fund and I'll put it into a staked fund. You know, it has to be at least 12% for me to be appetised by it. I'll take that money, put it in a staked fund.

Now, if I see a massive spike on the market, like TRX two years ago in December did 110% a day. If I say something like that, I'm cashing in. Like straight away, I'm cashing in because I guarantee watching the market so long, you see that absolute run up in price.

In the next two weeks, it comes back to pre-elevation on the price. So, you know, I've sold out at the top there. Now I'm buying back in before it broke out.

I've not only almost doubled my purchasing power, it's now going to be worth almost triple when I hit it the next time around when it goes back up. So I'll treat that like that. And then obviously, when it comes to perpetual trading or leverage trading or margin trading, however you want to call it, I operate in the sense of this is highly, highly structured, highly, highly documented.

I need as much data as humanly possible to understand myself, my trading and how well I'm doing or how bad I'm doing at any given moment. So I always keep them separate. And that's what I recommend to everyone is if you're an investor, be an investor.

If you're a trader, be a trader. You can be both, but you need to separate them.

[Speaker 2] (19:45 - 20:02)
When you're kind of looking at new stuff coming in, because I've heard they're kind of released in different markets before they come into the big like the Binance and things like that. Are you looking at things before they go into the big platforms? Because I've heard that's where you make the legs.

[Speaker 1] (20:03 - 21:11)
Okay. Yep. So that was a tactic four years ago.

That was great four years ago. And now some of the people are still hearing this. I want to put that out there to everyone right now.

That is not the case anymore. Yes, we used to look for coins or we'd have discord channels of these coins or telegrams. And as soon as there was an announcement like BitGet, Binance, something like that is going to release it.

Bang, I buy them up. Not anymore. We're actually finding now that coins dump 60% once they hit the market on Binance or they hit the open market.

It's not like what it was four years ago where you could watch them, wait for an announcement, buy the coin, let it get accepted. Now the mainstream has access to it because the only people who are able to buy it outside of the exchanges were the guys who knew how to operate on DeFi. So you've got all these people who don't know how to operate on DeFi waiting on the exchanges going, come on guys, list it.

And as soon as they do, that's where the majority of money was coming from was all these retailers. The DeFi guys had already bought way before the announcement were laughing. Anyone in retail was just exit liquidity.

Not so much now. They've flipped the script. Okay.

Interesting.

[Speaker 2] (21:12 - 21:18)
I know you touch on FTX as well. So you're kind of tight on that one.

[Speaker 1] (21:20 - 25:32)
Don't run a crypto exchange like a fractionalized bank. Because when people come a calling for their money and you don't have it, at least banks are insured and governments are willing to bail them out. Not crypto exchanges.

Sam Bankman-Fried, six biggest supporter of Joe Biden's campaign. That would explain why he's allowed out on the weekends or he's able to fly in business class for his family under accentuating circumstances. But he ran it completely wrong.

He thought if I run this crypto exchange like a bank, it's going to be awesome. We've got $9.6 billion in funds. We've up everything we can.

We've got $150 million worth of property under the company name, all that sort of stuff of clients' funds. So when they came to CFTX, they only had, I think it was like $9.6 billion. They only had $900 million or $90 million.

I can't remember that exact figure, but they only had just under one tenth of what they owed. And doing that, he hurt a lot of people. A lot of people don't realize when these sort of events happen, the black swan events like FTX, Luna, all those sort of things, that a lot of people commit suicide.

That's the downside to it. For every 1%, the unemployment rate goes up in America, 24,000 people kill themselves. Now, like FTX, it wasn't as predominant as Luna in the sense how people lost funds.

It was devastating that there wasn't more done around suicide hotlines and so forth for people to help them. Like I met a gentleman in Portugal last year, ran from Crypto Banter. Some of the community out there might know who he is.

And he got up on stage and told us all how he lost $100 million on Luna. So, you know, my $250,000 seems like nothing to that. But in saying that, these black swan events hurt a lot of people.

My opinion on them is, one, FTX, don't run yourself like a bank. You're not a fractionalized reserve that has insurances, securities, and bailouts. And Sam Brinkman-Fried, you're a bit of a dick.

You knew better, especially when it came to Alamanda. And the fact that CZ from Binance was the one who actually sounded the alarm that FTX had no liquidity, that tells me that these guys know what's going on. They knew for a long time.

They were just waiting for the right time to tell the world. When it comes to exchanges as well, like FTX, obviously, they go down the whole, not your keys, not your coin. I'm a strong believer in that.

That's why I operate in the DeFi space so much. That when these sites go down, you don't have access to your funds. Exchange is a place of transaction.

It's not to store your value. People have shifted their minds towards banking systems and exchanges. Like, where do you keep your money?

I keep it in the bank. A bank is a place of exchange to buy bonds, treasuries, stocks. It's a facilitator of exchange.

Same as a crypto exchange. It's not a bank, but it's an exchange. We don't hold our wealth on there.

So if you are people who are holding large sums or even got hurt from holding large sums on FTX, always, always keep your life savings on your own wallet. It is the safest place for it to be. And most of the people, I think, that got hurt the worst on FTX, and this isn't trying to diminish how they were hurt or insult them in any way, but you should have known better than keeping millions of dollars on one exchange.

This is why we track wallets on Twitter and so forth. We have wallet tracker accounts that track wallets moving money onto exchanges and money moving off the exchanges because whales don't keep their money on exchanges. So why should you?

[Speaker 2] (25:34 - 26:20)
What's your thoughts on the crypto claims? Because there's a few organizations for things like FTX and other ones, but FTX in particular. So then people had, you know, whatever it was worth and then they were selling them at like 20% and then it was going up and up and up.

You have the broker that's actually making 1-2%. When those boys buying that and then it started going up and everything, you know that they're being shafted. The end user, the guy that has it is being shafted.

So it's a big game and I've seen that happen and I know somebody that does that and they're making millions and it's kind of like, I ain't done this deal and it's like people are pieces of shit to them and it pisses me off because it's all orchestrated. So you're familiar with that, like you're aware of that.

[Speaker 1] (26:20 - 27:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We call them the cabals of crypto. You know, the people out there manipulating meme coins, doing, you know, the groups of people, they make millions from rorting everyday people and it breaks my heart.

That's why I always say, you know, book in a link, it's on my Facebook, come and have a chat with me. I'm on Zoom, I'm on community calls, I'm doing things all the time, like I'm a very transparent person. These people who are doing that always stay in the shadows.

I'm trying to show you how to be in the light and I guess that's one advantage I'll always have over the nasties, that's what I call the scammers, the nasties, is that I'll always show my face and I'll always show up. So, you know, these people won't. And one added bonus, if you didn't facilitate a message to someone about crypto and they've messaged you first, it's probably a scam.

99% of that will be a scam. Just stay safe out there, guys. Do your due diligence and make sure you can actually talk to the person, you know, not just talk to them, but someone you can build a relationship with.

It doesn't have to be an intimate relationship, but it can be a very nice working relationship. They're the people that want to see you succeed. They're the genuine guys out here who have learnt it, like myself.

We've studied it, we've put time into it, we've got certified in it. We're the ones who will step up and always put our faces to things. These guys won't.

[Speaker 2] (27:51 - 28:20)
With, you know, because you mentioned like Telegram and Discard, I don't know, I just found just so many scammers on them. And you're just getting messages, messages. I don't even respond to whatever.

And then you just see after a while, delete it, because obviously it's been reported. But that's all. The problem is you've only so much bandwidth.

And I mean, I'm doing a lot of different businesses and different things. And it's like, I just stopped using them because they're just taking your time. How do you navigate that when, you know, that's your kind of bread and butter?

[Speaker 1] (28:21 - 29:49)
Yeah, so I can identify very, very quickly. Being in the industry for so long, I guess that's a bit of my superpower I have over other people, is that I can spot bullshit a mile away. How do I deal with like Discord and that?

I try and keep my account off the public as much as possible. On my personal account, obviously you're a part of Discord group, scammers are in there, they're going to try and contact you. I literally just go through it straight away, block, block, block, block, block.

That's all I want to know from you. Now with Telegram and so forth, that's a little bit of a different kettle of fish. Most people have it.

I know clients of mine that have been scammed from Telegram accounts impersonating me. And I always say to them, one, I do not message clients, students on Telegram whatsoever. So don't ever think that you will get a message from me.

My personal network is on my WhatsApp. I don't keep crypto clients on there at all. Facebook Messenger, that's where I keep a lot of clients, groups and so forth to talk.

Everyone's got a Facebook or most of the populace has a Facebook nowadays. And that's where I like to create it. Again, like I said, WhatsApp is my personal network.

Telegram is virtually just my group scanning, my community scanning. What's going on in this community? What's happening here?

What's happening there? It's more of a news tool than it is a messaging tool for me.

[Speaker 2] (29:52 - 29:55)
You stay away from NFTs or do you do anything with that?

[Speaker 1] (29:57 - 30:47)
Well, NFTs, I do stay away. They've got an incredibly bad stigma to them. Obviously, everyone buying rocks for $21 million.

They can't sell for 20 now of a picture of an animated rock. Look, NFTs, tokenization, in my mind, is the new word for NFT. You'll say, oh, tokenize assets, tokenize this.

Because if we look at NFT, what does it stand for? Non-fungible token. And what are we making?

We're putting gold on the blockchain. We're tokenizing. So we're virtually creating an NFT and it's such, it's just not a picture, it's a coin.

It's an asset class. So tokenization, NFTs are still there. They've just updated the name.

[Speaker 2] (30:49 - 31:05)
So I'm looking at the tokenization, but I've seen a few companies, I've had some people coming on and I'm in talks with somebody. I don't think it can be done properly unless the government gets involved because- It cannot be done correctly.

[Speaker 1] (31:05 - 32:30)
And I wrote a paper on this on my Facebook. So if anyone wants to join my Facebook, they can, on tokenization about any assets that are tokenized right now, they're not even certified that they're backed like one-to-one, that they have it. Two in that in tokenization is they don't pay dividends on stocks.

Because again, we don't know who's holding this or regulatory, or even if they have the shares to hold. So the idea of tokenization is it's pegged and paired to a share. So if I buy one share of Apple, which is whatever, it might be $133, I own one share of Apple.

That means now that I have one NFT as such, but I'm not being paid any dividends whatsoever. I'm not being paid any money. I'm getting the growth.

But again, most people buy stocks for that dividend. Like in Australia, we've got franking credits. I buy a lot of my stocks that have 100% franking credits.

That means that when I get paid my dividends from banks, companies, whatever, being 100% franked, they pay the tax. So I don't have to pay tax on my dividends. It's a great investment tool for retirees who hold shares because then they don't have to pay tax on it.

Their pension stays the same.

[Speaker 2] (32:32 - 33:11)
But the one that I'm looking at is more real estate. So a development or something like that. And the people are thinking that you can buy one share or even a hundred bucks worth of something.

And yeah, you can have a dividend so that if the profits are going in, it's split out into the thing. But I can go in and sell that and it's not really linked. And that's why I'm saying it has to local government.

If the government is part of this, then it works. But otherwise, you're basically having to trust somebody and just say it was me and I get hit by a bus. Everybody then is just holding something that has worked nothing.

[Speaker 1] (33:12 - 34:03)
Yeah. Well, a fun fact about that in the sense of you holding something someone trusts, like you've used USDT before, correct? I know a lot of people out there in the crypto space use USDT.

Fun facts. Go online on YouTube, have a look at the conspiracy of it. They're a Hong Kong based company that has pegged the cryptocurrency to the US dollar.

They've never proven that they have one to one dollars. There's speculation that they're only holding around 2% of the overall market cap in USDT. It's been banned in Europe.

And little known fact, they have master control over the account. So if you've got USDT in your account, they can freeze it. They can actually halt it.

They have the power to do that. 4.2 billion dollars worth of criminal funds have been halted and seized by the USDT network.

[Speaker 2] (34:06 - 34:07)
Oh, that's interesting.

[Speaker 1] (34:07 - 34:14)
Yeah. So that's a fun fact that's not talked about too often is that they have the ability to freeze accounts.

[Speaker 2] (34:17 - 35:02)
The one for me is everybody thinks nobody knows what you're doing, you're buying it. You know, but when you're going on to all these exchanges, you have to give all the KYC. They know everything.

You give your passport, your face, your scanning, you're doing everything. And then they think that they can move it around and nobody knows anything. And then, unfortunately, depending on the country, because there's some country, there's no capital gains.

And if you're a nomad, you're okay as well, because you're kind of moving around the place. You're not kind of in one country for 180 days, whatever it is. Unless it's the US, because the US kind of tax you no matter where you are.

But I think they're actually setting people up to when they realize they've got so much, and then they come in and go, plus tax, plus bounties, plus everything else. And they just empty it. Can you see that happening?

[Speaker 1] (35:03 - 36:18)
You'd agree? I could agree with that wholeheartedly. I really could.

I've seen, being in the industry for 13 years now, I've seen some strange things happen with different companies. That is one of my strong beliefs about what's going on as well. They're clearing accounts.

You're doing well for yourself, they'll clear the account. I do think they have, like now that AI is such a big thing, reverse engineering or tracking is going, it's going to be able to do it faster and quicker and better than any human could do it. That's why the ATO doesn't, or the Australian tax office, from my understanding, doesn't pursue crypto earning so much.

They don't have the manpower nor the knowledge to pursue it. They're not going to spend $180,000 to try and recoup $20,000. A lot of governments have done worse.

Paul Hogan, I think it was Crocodile Dundee, that's Paul Hogan. He got hit with a massive tax bill from Australia. I think they spent $250 million to get $20 million out of him.

And you're telling me the country's being run correctly? I beg to differ.

[Speaker 2] (36:21 - 36:39)
Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And with AI then, one, are you using it to kind of find the right things and watch your thoughts on it? Because there's some people selling stuff that's doing it and they're not sure.

I've never tried it, so I don't know how it works.

[Speaker 1] (36:40 - 36:55)
Yeah. So in that sense, when they're selling it as such and how we handle it, sorry, just lost my train of thought on that one. Ask that question again, Rick.

[Speaker 2] (36:57 - 37:00)
I think there's a lot of us losing our train of the AI.

[Speaker 1] (37:00 - 39:00)
So using AI and how they're using it. Because I was thinking about five different things then with the AI. One, first thing people do is they take their chart and they put it into AI and go, give me the best scenario.

And they'll do it with ChatGDP. Don't do that. Don't do that.

ChatGDP is a generic AI. It's not a specific AI. And even when I've tested out some of the charting AIs, I do it better than them anyway.

And you'll see me on my community calls or when I talk on stage, I'll actually say, I prefer the human touch. There's no one to blame if I get this wrong, bar me. There's no one that's going to improve after this, when I get this wrong, bar me.

That AI is going to keep getting things wrong because it's not being taught to get any better. So that's the first thing people do with AI. The most efficient thing that I do with AI is I run my trading journal, all my trades that I make, all that sort of stuff.

I run that through AI and I get it to deliver me ideas around where I can improve. And that's where I'll go through and I'll put the data side by side and I'll read it through to make sure there's no hallucinations or anything like that with AI. Now, the next thing with AI in the crypto space is there is a lot of talk around AI tokens and all that.

I haven't seen one that's great. Teo got some around Bitcensor, all that sort of stuff. He had the best.

An eight-year-old kid can make that, I think, in some regards. But with AI and bots and stuff, people are developing AI bots to trade. I have not come across a good bot someone is selling because if you've got, and this is what I want to say to everybody, if you've got a good bot like that that's making $10,000 a day or $10,000 an hour, why would you sell that to other people?

You would just keep it to yourself until it was no longer...

[Speaker 2] (39:00 - 39:01)
You'd just have it frozen.

[Speaker 1] (39:03 - 40:19)
Yep, that's right. And then once it didn't become viable anymore, they're the people that come in and go, look what I've been doing for two years with this bot. It's made me $1.3 million. But he's not telling you the last three months, it's cost him $20,000 each month. So I haven't seen a successful AI bot yet. Now, what I do and I say to people, my new program is called GridBotBuilder because we work with grid bots.

Now people ask, oh, is it AI strategy? No. There is an AI component in it through exchanges that will find you.

It'll make it easier to find scenarios in which to use the algorithmic trading because that's what it is. We're using GridBots is the name of the product, but we're using algorithmic trading or geometrical trading to automate our trading process. Now, that's what I use AI to help me define what my parameters should be in my bot that I'm building.

Now, a bot isn't just a self-thinking thing, it's a bunch of information with parameters around if this do that. So it's not AI based when I'm running algorithmic trading, it is literally parameter based or prompt based, if you will.

[Speaker 2] (40:19 - 40:19)
Okay.

[Speaker 1] (40:20 - 40:45)
So AI as a whole shouldn't be used in the sense of identifying charts or it should be used in the sense of asking a question, how does a fair value gap affect an order block, things like that, things that are actually going to give you information back that are going to help you not give you the answer as such to which way should I trade today?

[Speaker 2] (40:47 - 41:08)
Very interesting. And just finally, because the way you're doing it, because not really the prices, because I mean, depending on when people listen to this, because this recording is in the 18th of September, 2026, because people could listen to this, but when people are actually coming into your system, is this kind of a monthly, a yearly or lifetime fee that you do?

[Speaker 1] (41:09 - 41:54)
Yep. So all these people out there, there's certain operators and I've seen how the gurus and the Hopium guys all work. And I do one-time payments, one-time payment.

And that's a three month thing, so 90 days. I've been getting results in this new program is 36 days old, and we've got clients already making their initial investment back within 14 days. So we're seeing some really good results early with it.

So moving forward with it, it's, yeah, look, it's something that's very appealing to me and I will continue to track that path, but it is not AI-based. It is bot-based.

[Speaker 2] (41:56 - 42:01)
Excellent. I've totally enjoyed it. You might let the listeners know where they can find you, Stuart.

[Speaker 1] (42:02 - 42:40)
Yeah. So guys, if you come over and look at, look me up on Facebook, you will find me there. You can go online onto Google and put in a grid bot builder and our platform is hosted through WAP.

You can find us through there, or you can just reach out and, you know, through Facebook or any of the multitude of platforms we're all on these days and ask me for a booking link and I'll send that out to you. So the best way to find me is probably through grid bot builder, and you can look that up on Google. It will pop up.

It's hosted through WAP again. And yeah, I look forward to hopefully talking to some of you guys out there.

[Speaker 2] (42:41 - 43:04)
Perfect. Yeah. Let me make sure I put all the links put on the audio and the video.

Thank you very much. That's all for the crypto podcast. You'll find everything about me, scan the QR code or go to roycolin.com.

I've got two private business groups. If you're interested in that, I've also got a VA business, so you can go to va.world. Make sure to give us a thumbs up, maybe share with three friends until next week. Take care.