Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bitcoin really just allows you to own something that can't be debased or printed away.
You know, I mentioned the US Dollar and what we're seeing. We just continuously see our purchasing power of our dollars decrease over time. I think, you know, the median cost of a home in 2000 in the United States was around 165,000.
Today it's about 400,000. So this has everything to do with the money printer just fueling inflation. And the Federal Reserve can print money or make digital money out of thin air. And it's really affecting our bank accounts. Right. It's also affecting our futures.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Hey, good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon. Wherever you may be listening to this or watching this today, I want to welcome Lindsay Foust from River.com, river Financial to the show today to talk to us about Bitcoin and what river has to do with your bitcoin.
River is a US based bitcoin focused financial platform helping individuals and businesses buy, sell and securely store Bitcoin. It offers services like brokerage, custody, recurring investments and lightning payments, all designed for long term investors. But what sets river apart is its Bitcoin only approach. It doesn't mess with Ethereum or any of the other meme coins that may be out there.
They have a strong emphasis on transparency and security and a simple client first experience.
Lindsay is a relationship manager at river where she works with private clients and businesses to integrate Bitcoin into their long term wealth strategies. She focuses on trusts and LLCs, frequently partnering with law firms like ours to help navigate incorporating Bitcoin into estate plans. So, Lindsay, I'd like to welcome you to the show today. How are you doing?
[00:01:58] Speaker A: I'm great. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Great. Well, we'll just jump right into it. I understand that Rivers made a very intentional decision to focus only on Bitcoin.
Can you break down why Bitcoin stands apart from other cryptocurrencies?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin stands apart from crypto in a few simple ways.
You know, with bitcoin there's no one in charge. It's decentralized. And most cryptos have a company or maybe a team behind them making these decisions. And bitcoin just doesn't. There's no CEO, there's no headquarters. It's just a network of people all over the world that are running it together.
There's also a fixed supply of bitcoin, so it's inherently scarce. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin.
You can't print more of it. And a lot of other cryptos can change their rules or their supply over time. So it just kind of eats away at the value of it. Right. Kind of like what we're seeing with the US Dollar.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Right?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Right, yeah. And so it's also just been around the longest. It was the first of all of them. And it survived so much over the years, whether it's huge price steps. Right. Seeing it just crash completely, or maybe it's governments trying to ban it. And because of this, it's really been battle tested over the years and it's still here and going strong.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, I hold Bitcoin. Full disclosure. I have some bitcoin, I have some Ethereum too, but it's mostly bitcoin. That's the only cryptocurrency I've ever put my money into.
And it's sort of the og you know, the, the original gangster out there of, of cryptocurrencies.
And I've always thought of that too, that 21 million coins only. And what I'm hearing now is because energy's getting so expensive, a lot of our crypto miners, our clients who own crypto mining serving server farms, have just pulled the plug because they said that the price of the energy to create them has, or to find the cryptocurrency through doing the math on the servers has gotten so expensive that it's just not worth what they would make from the cryptocurrency. So with that fixed supply out there, I mean, it's even, it's even different from gold because there's only so much that's ever going to be done.
How should investors think about that in contrast to fiat currency or other cryptocurrencies that just have that unlimited supply out there?
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, bitcoin really just allows you to own something that can't be debased or printed away.
You know, I mentioned the US dollar and what we're seeing, we just continuously see our purchasing power of our dollars decrease over time. I think, you know, the, the median cost of a home in 2000 in the United States was around 165,000.
Today it's about 400,000. So this has everything to do with the money printer just fueling inflation. And the Federal Reserve can print money or make digital money out of thin air. And it's really affecting our bank accounts. Right. It's also affecting our futures. Over time.
We touched on how bitcoin is controlled, isn't controlled by a single group or a company behind it. But crypto, a lot of the times is, and it's the same idea here because they have someone behind it, they also have the ability to create more if they want to. And so this can drive the value of that down. Whereas with bitcoin, and entire network of people throughout the globe would have to agree that they want to print or mint more bitcoin if they create more than 21 million, essentially what they're doing is agreeing to devalue the very bitcoin that they own and hold. So it just is very, very unlikely that that would ever happen.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not, it's not even like a corporate stock on the, on the equities market that they can split two for one or they can decide, oh, we're going to issue another hundred million shares or you know, things like that, we're going to issue of stock which then decreases the value of everything else that's already out there.
From an educational standpoint, how are you helping clients, especially those who are new to bitcoin, get some confidence in it as a legitimate long term asset within their estate planning strategy?
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I work with a lot of clients who are brand new to bitcoin and just eager to get started. And so we touched on a lot of the educational aspects previously and we go over that a lot of the times on our initial intro calls.
But in addition to that, I really just think it's about how they approach their strategy and just being very transparent about the fact that bitcoin is incredibly volatile. We see these crazy price swings where it goes up and it goes down, but it's just to remind them that timing the market, it's not possible. So trying to time the market, it's never going to work.
Bitcoin is something that we need to look at more as a long term investment. And if your goal is to make a quick buck, bitcoin just might not be the right investment for you.
If you're looking to cash out in a year or two, you know, that's you're putting your money at risk just due to the volatility and the nature of bitcoin alone. So, and this is not financial advice for me, but I typically say give yourself a Runway of four to five years at least before you think you'll ever need to access that bitcoin, if not much, much longer than that. I mean, me personally, I'm buying bitcoin too. Right. I work at a bitcoin company, so no news there, but I don't intend to touch my bitcoin until my 60s. And my personal goal is to touch as little as possible, if not any of it, so that I can pass it to my kids and my grandchildren. Because I do believe that it's going to hold that store of value and just grow over time.
Yeah, as far as like working with someone new to bitcoin, I think it's really just reminding them, you know, take the emotion out of it. And there's ways to do that. You can actually do it on river. So we have something called recurring buy orders.
What's nice about these, we actually don't charge fees after the first seven days, so they'll fall off and go to zero. And, and it's designed to help clients build their bitcoin wealth over time. We want to incentivize that with recurring orders. It's just you're selecting a cadence. So maybe you're buying daily, weekly, bi weekly.
You might have heard this be referred to as dollar cost averaging. And so you're just buying at whatever the price is. It's price agnostic. It doesn't matter if it's high, doesn't matter if it's low. So ultimately you're just capturing all of that and getting a smoother price overall.
But at the end of the day, you know, bitcoin wealth building it, it requires a lot of patience and discipline and just reminding that it isn't just some get rich quick scheme.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: So yeah, I think, and I think a lot of people have a misconception. I had a lady one time back when bitcoin was in, you know, around $30,000 a coin and for an entire coin and she was going to use her self directed IRA money to buy into bitcoin.
And this was, gosh, it's probably about seven, eight years ago. And she calls me and she says, oh well, it took too long to get my self directed IRA LLC set up. So now Bitcoin's 32,000 and I only have 30,000 to invest. So I just can't buy bitcoin. And I told her, I told her, I said, if you, if you think that's how it works, you probably shouldn't buy into it because a lot of people don't understand. You can actually buy, I mean, very tiny fractions myself.
I sat back one day and said, look, I spend roughly $25 a day on lunch, going out to eat, so I could go out one less day a week and I would just set it and forget it to buy $25 of Bitcoin a week.
And that's what I did. And I started it a year or two ago. And so it just buys $25 every week. I get an email and a text, hey, you're about to buy 0.00000 point blah blah blah of bitcoin. And I go, okay, that's nice. But over time it does add up, it does grow.
And you know, it is like dollar cost averaging.
You're. And you can do that. I mean not just with bitcoin. You can do it with stock market, you can do it with anything. It's a great way to start building it.
And you do, you set it and forget it. And it's just buying.
And over time you'll see it will grow. I, I had an account that I'd opened with fifteen hundred dollars about fifteen years ago, not with bitcoin, but with just some equities and an online account. Totally forgot about it. And I got a 1099 in the email from them a few weeks ago and I went, what is this about? And I said, I closed this account because I deleted the app years ago. I thought I had closed the account and liquidated the account 10 years ago, redownload the app, got back into the, to the system, looked at it, I had almost $30,000 sitting there that I had literally just from 1500 to 30,000 over 10, 15 years that I just totally forgotten about. And I said, oh, that's cool.
So that's the way that wealth can grow like that. You forget about it.
So a lot of platforms make it difficult though to integrate your estate planning tools. So we may set up a trust for someone and they go, okay, but now what do I do about my bitcoin account?
What does river do with that to make it more trust friendly when it comes to onboarding and managing that type of structure?
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it, it really comes down to the white glove service that we offer. And not every platform really cares about the client in the same way that we do.
That being said, we really recognize the importance just of protecting one's legacy and planning for that. So being a client first company, we're focused on what our clients need and what the easiest way for them to accomplish something actually is from a trust side of things and onboarding that we put a lot of work into how we actually onboard them.
And I've been with River a little over four years now, so believe me when I say we've gone through many iterations since I started, it's only evolved into being even easier for our clients over time. And we even still have more process improvements in place to further improve that segment. But we have the simplest onboarding of any entity type compared to any other platform. I firmly believe that I might be biased, but when comparing to other platforms, I mentioned that White Glove service. So anyone with a trust will either have a one on one contact, whether that's with a relationship manager like myself, or they'll work directly one on one with our onboarding specialists. So we're always available to walk through that process or answer any questions that our clients have.
But I'll be completely honest, we don't get a ton of questions around the onboarding process itself.
And part of that is because of the ease of going through it. Right. So we require an application. It takes maybe five minutes. It's one page, it's very, very brief.
We collect a trust agreement or if you rather we can do a certificate or memorandum. Sometimes it's just easier to pull those out and then we'll do a photo ID for the authorized person.
Now we can have your account set up within 24 hours.
Usually it's the same day. To be completely honest, our onboarding specialist is super, super fast.
Other platforms can take anywhere from weeks to months to get you onboarded and set up. And in that time window a lot can change with bitcoin. So you can also miss out on a lot of opportunity if it's taking that long just to get something set up.
That being said, we also don't charge a fee to onboard entities. Whether it's a trust or an LLC or any business type really, it can be upwards of thousands of dollars when you work with other platforms too.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, we have, like I said, we have a lot of people who will, we will set up a self directed IRA LLC with a Checkbook Control LLC and then they will use that to open their account somewhere else. But then they go, okay, but what happens when I die? Or how is this going to be handled? You know, through the custodian, with the llc, with the crypto wallet holder and all that.
So how do you guys simplify that of purchasing, continuing to purchase bitcoin going forward?
Maybe they are doing dollar cost average purchasing, auto purchasing and things like that, plus custody, holding that bitcoin compared to other platforms. How do you guys handle that?
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean compared to other platforms, I think a lot of the simplicity just comes from the fact that we are bitcoin only. So if that's what you're interested in, you've come to the right place. I mean if you Log into the coinbases of the world or Robinhood, right. You're met with hundreds of crypto. You might even be prompted to make a sports bet. And on river, they're doing a lot these days.
On river, it really is just bitcoin and dollars. That's it. We're not bombarding with a million other products or things to invest in. Right.
Once your account is open, it's as easy as logging in and linking a bank account. So you can do that in minutes. Or if you prefer to do wire transfers, we can fund the account that way too.
But once your account is set up to be funded, it's as easy as just hitting that buy button. So there's a handful of ways clients can buy bitcoin. On river, we can do spot buys. So just log in, hit the buy button, get bitcoin at the price that it is right now.
We mentioned those recurring orders again, what's nice about those is there's zero fees after the first seven days. So we're incentivizing that long term buying schedule.
What we didn't touch on with recurring orders is you can actually do something called supercharge, where let's say you're purchasing $100 worth of Bitcoin a week.
If you supercharge it, let's say by 50% and the rolling 7 day price has is down by 1% or more, you can have it automatically buy $150 worth of Bitcoin. So you're buying more when the price of bitcoin dips and you're still getting zero fees. So that's a really cool feature that we launched not too long ago. Yeah, it's awesome. We also do target orders, they're limit orders. So you set the target price right if you want to buy $50,000 worth of Bitcoin. If or when the price reaches 65k, the order is going to automatically execute for you. So when it's 4am and you're fast asleep and the price dips, it's going to trigger and it'll automatically buy it for you while you're sleeping, which is cool.
Yeah. And then on the custody side, which I don't think I got into from a custody perspective, like how is river set up for this? So by default, all of our clients bitcoin is held offline in a cold storage vault so they don't have to worry about whether or not their bitcoin Bitcoin is protected.
We haven't touched on like what cold storage and a hot wallet. Is, but simply put, a hot wallet is connected to the Internet. It's more susceptible to attacks or to. Yeah, to attacks. A cold wallet is not. So it's virtually inaccessible to the outside world.
So that's where our clients bitcoin is held, is offline in a cold storage vault. And we actually built it ourselves in house so we don't use third parties.
And part of the reason is, and something our CEO Alex says is we won't do anything that doesn't allow us to sleep at night. And custodying our clients Bitcoin with a third party where we have no idea how they're managing client funds, it just doesn't sit well with us because we can't with 100% confidence say that their bitcoin is protected. So that's part of the reason we took this, this long, slow and difficult route of building it ourselves in house.
A lot of other, you know, bitcoin only platforms do use third parties. They also might charge you a fee to custody or Bitcoin river doesn't do that. Nor do we have to because we're not paying a third party. We just think everyone deserves a secure place to hold their bitcoin if they need it.
Yeah. So really just kind of providing that built in feature to our clients.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Yesterday, this week, earlier this week, Anthropic came out and said, hey, we've actually developed a version of Claude Claude Mythos that is too dangerous to release to the public because we tested it against all these different operating systems and it found security vulnerabilities that it could exploit multiple times in all of them. And then you start thinking about, okay, well so what? But then you think, yeah, you've got currencies that are stored and if they're connected to the Internet and something like that can get to them, it can crack in and it can take that kind of stuff. But if it's not connected to the Internet, that's why that cold storage is so important.
You can't get to it.
So you don't have to be concerned that Mythos can get in there and take your money or destroy your money.
So let's walk through this.
Say someone does own.
They have Bitcoin held maybe at Robinhood, maybe they have it held at PayPal or Coinbase or whatever.
They come to you and they say, okay, we want to open an account and the account is my llc or the account is I want to put it into my revocable living trust. Or maybe it's a irrevocable trust for My children or something.
So they open that account with River.
How do the people move that account over into River?
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, first we would onboard them, right? We would have to onboard that trust or that llc. Or maybe it's just an individual who prefers to custody it under their own name. We can do that too.
As far as moving it over, once the account is set up, there's literally just a receive Bitcoin button.
First you have to submit what's called ID verification, where you're just snapping a photo of yourself and your id. What we're doing there is really just verifying that you are the person that opened the account.
But that gets approved instantaneously.
From there, you just have a receive address. So if you're on Robinhood, you would copy that receive address from river, you would go to Robinhood, enter it in to send it over.
I put caution on this, just a little bit of cautionary tape and saying, don't do your full balance all at once.
Always, always, always do a test transaction. So maybe you're sending hundred dollars worth at a time to start. So maybe do 1, 2.
Once you see that go through successfully, once you see it land in the river account, then go ahead and do the majority of the funds from there. But yeah, definitely always encourage a test transaction prior to initiating that send.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: And then as they hold the account, maybe they're doing the auto buys, the supercharged buys, the limited buys, everything that you guys offer there throughout their life. Then they die or they become incapacitated and the trustee takes over.
Is that a problem for you guys, how you handle that?
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So what's nice is if you're holding in an llc, if you're holding in a trust, we already have all of that documentation on file. So we actually know what the next steps are. Now, we don't proactively reach out because we don't necessarily know if something has happened to you.
So I always encourage clients, let your loved ones know that you have a River account. Right. Because if they don't know that it's there, it might take a while before they realize it.
But all your loved ones have to do is reach out to our team. We provide real human support. So you're not going to get an AI bot, you're going to talk to a real person.
We will literally hold their hand through the process. So if something happens to you, basically they're reaching out to us.
We collect a few documents to verify everything, right? Maybe like a death certificate, photo ID for them, just to ensure that it's actually them.
We'll actually help them to open their own river account. So we might move that trust over if needed, or we're transferring assets to them as individuals, whatever the trust reads as.
But typically, once we're alerted and we have those documents, we can have everything moved over in two or three business days. So really quick turnaround time. We want to make sure that we're providing that support to your loved ones while they're dealing with what might be a very difficult, difficult time. So.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Well, and I think that's where the difference is. A lot of, A lot of these companies, they go, well, you don't have their password, so you can't get in. You can't log into their account and change things over on your own.
You guys, it's, it's almost more like a bank. If someone had a bank account, that trustee would then walk into a bank and say, hey, they're gone. Here's the trust agreement, here's the, here's my ID and everything.
Verify it. And then the bank goes, okay, now we take orders from you. What do you want? Sort of like we do on our land trust side, where someone dies, the next person comes in, says, they're gone. Here's proof they're gone. Here's proof of who I am. Now I'm in charge and I go, okay, now what do we do? What do you want us to do?
That's good because that's one of the biggest issues that we see with any kind of digital assets. Even if it's, you know, something as simple as a Facebook account. People go, well, I don't have moms login information, so I don't, I can't get into the account because they've not set up the legacy passing on how that happens, what I call the dead man switch.
So it sounds like you guys have a really cool, cool product there, really cool plan.
Is there anything else that I haven't asked that you think that people should understand about river and how it's going to. How it works and some of the benefits compared to other platforms?
[00:24:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we hit on all of the bitcoin side. Right. So you can buy bitcoin on River. There's multiple ways of doing so. It's whatever you're comfortable with and however you want to pursue that approach.
You know, I mentioned we don't necessarily have to hold our clients hands through onboarding, but we do a lot of helpful, like Google Meets or phone calls before the onboarding process so that you can get familiar with River So that you could know what to expect.
Or maybe it's post onboarding and you want me to hop on a call with you and help you set up that first recurring order. It is intimidating, right? It's your first time buying bitcoin, so we can do that too.
Not only can you buy bitcoin on river, but let's say you do have some event in your life happen and you need to liquidate. You can sell bitcoin on river too. So we're not locking you into owning bitcoin forever. We give you that option.
Once bitcoin is sold, you can transfer those funds right back to a bank account. Usually lands within one day, if at most two.
So we're not, we're not holding you hostage in bitcoin, but we just hope that you hold for the long term, right outside of bitcoin in itself. I think something important to note just where river is going right now. And so we're building what we're referring to as this, this dual currency era where we see clients saving in bitcoin but spending in dollars.
So that being said, we're kind of getting into this banking with bitcoin world. So clients also have the option to set up direct deposit. So a lot of our clients actually have a portion or maybe all of their paycheck going directly into their river account. And it can actually auto invest a portion of it into bitcoin with zero fees as well.
So maybe you're depositing your paycheck and you want to auto invest 10%, you can configure it to do so. So another form of dollar cost averaging, Any cash on river also earns interest at 3.3%.
So think, yeah, it's by far my favorite product, but I think it's because I get a lot of use out of it because I hold my emergency fund on river. I don't plan to spend it, so why not put it to work, right?
And so what's really cool about the interest product, your cash, not only is it earning 3.3%, your bank is probably paying you maybe 0.01%. So on average, we're paying like 330 times more interest, but we're also paying it in bitcoin. So you're actually earning bitcoin as the return from the interest.
So you're not just like earning it, earning more. You're earning it in an asset that has outperformed every other asset for the last decade.
So that's the interest side I mentioned, target orders, right. If you set up a target order. We do debit that cash and hold it on reserve. But let's say it takes two weeks to execute. That cash is earning bitcoin interest every day. So for 14 days until it executes because it's still dollars in your account. So we're really kind of helping you build your bitcoin wealth and maybe make the most bang out of your buck, if you will.
Last side of this, like banking with bitcoin era, we actually launched bill pay.
So our clients actually have their own account and routing number directly in their login and they can use their cash balance or maybe their bitcoin balance to pay their bills. So maybe it's a utility bill. Right. You want to cover that? We have AEP in Ohio, my electricity provider. So I've linked it up there.
I've paid my Chase credit card bill directly from my river account. And the idea behind it is the value of our dollar is going down. How can we make sure that we're at least somewhat keeping pace with that? And if our bank isn't going to give us the interest that they are earning from investing our money.
Right. Or lending out our money, why not put it on river and kind of push back on that, earn that interest and use it as a bank account, an operating bank account too?
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Yeah. That is neat. Yeah. I hadn't heard about that. Yeah. To me, bitcoin cryptocurrency is just another currency. Whether you're buying euros or you're buying Swiss francs or you're buying the Malaysian dollar, whatever you're buying, it's another, to me, it's another currency you can buy. But like we said, it's finite, it's there. It's not just this fiat currency.
Whatever country or organization is in charge can continue to just create more and more and more.
So, you know, for someone who's looking, if you're ever looking at traveling overseas or moving to another country, maybe you do want to get where you're not. So dollar heavy, US dollar heavy. Maybe you want to start looking elsewhere.
And yeah, you can be anywhere else in the world and you can use bitcoin to, to, to buy and sell services and products in that, that other location, wherever you may be.
So definitely something to look into. I just want to point out to everybody here at the end, number one, I want to thank Lindsay for coming on, explaining everything that river provides. It's, it's very insightful, wonderful, and like I said, wanted to have you on because we do have a lot of clients who have, from small bitcoin accounts to extremely large bitcoins, Bitcoin accounts and then they always are. One of the brick walls we run into is when it comes to their estate planning or asset protection, we start going, okay, how are we going to protect this? How are we going to make sure it passes on to the next generation in a nice easy way? River, I think does that.
But just everybody understand this is not financial advice, of course, this is not legal advice. This is just information that we want to get out there to everybody, let you know that river exists.
It is definitely a platform to look into. If you do have a bitcoin account and you are considering how you're going to get that on to the next generation, how are you going to asset protect that as much as you can.
And River, I think is definitely one of those that you need to be evaluating out there as you're doing it. Lindsay, again, I want to thank you for coming on today and for everybody else out there who's been listening, who's been watching on your favorite platform, I want to thank you. If you like this, click the like button. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. We always need more subscribers and and you'll also get notifications when things like this are coming out. But until our next show, I want to ask everybody and tell everybody just trust this. Thanks for listening to this edition of Trust this. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep aspiring to a better life.
