Cryptocurrency? Sounds almost top secret or like something you’ve heard about on the dark web. Actually, cryptocurrency is a fascinating form of digital currency that seems to be sweeping the nation. Today, Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Steve Streetman, an avid cryptocurrency investor and real estate speaker, teacher, coach, and agent. Also, Steve is the president of Streetsmart Investments LLC, where he leads acquisition, property management, and business development. Steve has worked in cryptography and high-end computer modeling for more than 30 years. He has successfully acquired multiple commercial properties and is currently active in self-storage, student housing, and assisted living projects. Despite its negative stigma, Steve believes that cryptocurrency is here to stay – at least for a few more years. He shares how real estate and cryptocurrency can work together to make a positive impact.
Highlights/Topics:
- What is cryptocurrency? Online digital token; every transaction goes on a Blockchain (series of blocks of data chained together to view future and past transactions)
- Actual vs. Cryptocurrency: Buying power of dollar gets less every year, but cryptocurrency isn’t intentionally devalued
- Types of cryptocurrency, and where they get their value:
- Currency Token:
- Bitcoin: Gets value from supply and demand
- Trade Options (Troptions): Coins designed to be barter currency
- Security Token: Representation of value and ownership via:
- Initial Coin Offering (ICO), or
- Initial Public Offering (IPO)
- Currency Token:
- Ways to invest in cryptocurrency:
- Mining: Requires advanced computers to perform “hash” function faster; winner-takes-all approach to get your block done first to get cryptocurrency
- Buy land/property; cryptocurrency appreciation is taxable
- Get loan secured by your cryptocurrency to buy real estate
- Use cryptocurrency as collateral to avoid tax event; escrow companies hold it
- Companies may accept cryptocurrencies to make rental properties appear cool, updated, and modern to appeal to millennials
- Collect Rent: Give your digital wallet address to tenant; they send you the cryptocurrency
- Exchange Currency: Just like you trade dollars for euros, trade crypto for crypto or Fiat
- Real estate is low-hanging fruit for cryptocurrency to make substantial improvements
Contact Steve for more information, as well as to enter to win a free copy of his soon-to-be available book, Cryptocurrency and Real Estate.
Resources
RealInvestors Real Estate Services
Laws that Govern the Securities Industry
International Trade Exchange (ITEX)
Tax and Asset Protection Event
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: Welcome, everyone. Hi, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors and this is our podcast. Today, we have a very special guest, Steve Streetman is on with us from Street Smart Investments LLC.
Let me just tell you a little bit of background here on how I met Steve. I was actually at a realtor conference, a real estate investor conference, not too long ago in Baltimore, Maryland. Steve came by my booth and he asked me and he goes, “What do you know of cryptocurrency in real estate?” I had to be frank, “I don’t know. I know a little bit about cryptocurrency with what you hear on the news.” I explained to him that one of my good friends was a bankruptcy trustee. He’s in charge of one of the largest bankruptcy actions dealing with cryptocurrency from this farm. I’m not going to go into those details, but I also realized from talking to my bankruptcy trustee friend, that there’s a lot of money to be made here.
What really intrigued me, why I wanted to get Steve on this podcast is that he started talking about how real estate and cryptocurrency can work together and what you can do with it. It’s something that I, myself, I am always looking for new ways to invest in real estate, how you can make money at it, I thought, “This is a great topic.” I can learn more, you all can learn more, so that’s how this came about. We’re very happy to have Steve on here. Steve, how are you doing?
Steve: I am doing great, Clint. How are you today?
Clint: I’m doing excellent. Of course, it’s Washington and so it’s doing what it always does here which is rain. I’m used to it. I wouldn’t like it…
Steve: I’m in the other Washington and it’s gorgeous and sunny.
Clint: That’s because I’m not there. If I was there, I would have brought the rain with me. We want to keep me out of there. Anyways, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do and how you got started?
Steve: Well, my name is Steve Streetman. I’m actually located between Baltimore and Washington out in Maryland. I’m a licensed realtor, partially more as of a sideline for me. I also have a business where I do sort of advanced computer consulting. I do computer algorithm modeling, and terrorism risk assessment and I help apply artificial intelligence to selecting stocks, that sort of thing. I have a small consulting company. I’ve been a real estate investor since about 2004; focusing almost entirely on commercial real estate since about 2009.
I got into cryptocurrency maybe a year-and-a-half ago because a project was brought to me where I was actually trading land for cryptocurrency directly. That got me intrigued in the whole issue. I was doing my due diligence, trying to figure out whether this made sense because when I was looking at it, I hadn’t even really heard of cryptocurrency. I’ve heard of Bitcoin, but not anything else. Since then, I’ve become very fascinated by it. I am invested both in cryptocurrency and in real estate. I see a number of synergies between the two. I’m working on those sorts of issues. On the real estate side, I love apartments, self-storage, assisted living, student housing, those sorts of things. That’s sort of a nutshell of, I guess, who I am, what I’m interested in, and what I do.
Clint: With the cryptocurrency, I mean you said you’re invested in it, from talking to my friend, this bankruptcy guy, he’s telling me all about this huge farm is what they have where they actually are mining this cryptocurrency. I’ve understood from one of my employees that you have to have video cards. Do you have any of that stuff yourself? Is that how you’re investing or you’re doing it in a different way?
Steve: No, I don’t invest in that. That is one of the ways that you can invest in cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency is a digital currency or a token, and it’s online, and they get distributed and issued. Every time there’s a transaction, every time you send it, every time you exchange it, every time you buy some or sell some, that transaction goes on something called a Blockchain.
What the miners are doing is they’re each keeping their own copy of the Blockchain and the miners are trying to create the next block to go on the Blockchain. There’s sort of a winner take all approach from this for some of these mining approaches, so that every time you get your block done first, you get a certain amount of cryptocurrency. They make their business by mining the cryptocurrency and getting that new cryptocurrency, and that actually works out for them. You’re right, they have to have very advanced computers because they’re trying to do something called a hash function, faster than anybody else.
These huge farms of servers are trying to do this and there’s a lot of electricity and a lot of cooling, those are the main costs in the business. That has one interesting aspect in that if you own real estate and your real estate is in an area where you can get really cheap power, and you can get really cheap cooling, then it may be attractive to lease your real estate to one of these mining company. I know guys now who get 10 or 100 times the rent by leasing to these guys. One guy started leasing by cubic feet, it’s usually by the size of the server as opposed to by the square foot because he was leasing to be this sort of approaches. There’s one synergy between real estate and cryptocurrency, but it’s not one that I’m particularly involved in right now.
Clint: Yeah, I could see that. I mean if I had a building in the area—so here would be eastern Washington in which it has low power or the power is inexpensive over there—you set up building I guess, and then you would start leasing out space to different people who want to mine. They would come and put in their servers or their little boxes, I figure they’re called little farm boxes, and then lease space for them. Yeah, that’s interesting. It wouldn’t be much on the interior to build that structure out, you wouldn’t need a bunch of interior walls, you just need a bunch of cooling and power rolling into it. Wow.
Steve: That’s right.
Clint: Okay, so with cryptocurrency then since you straddle both sides, you’re doing the real estate and you say you’re investing in cryptocurrency. Can you explain to me, why? Because from the cryptocurrency standpoint, I really don’t get it. I’ve always looked at it as made-up stuff. I can’t come out and say, “Hey, here’s Clint’s cryptocurrency. We call it the triple C.” What’s to stop other people…
Steve: Which you could do by the way.
Clint: Yeah, I know but where’s the value in that? I just give it out to people who make this Blockchain? What are they doing for me? How do you get value from it, I guess? What is it backed by?
Steve: There’s more than one answer to that. Let me start with a very brief description of what cryptocurrency is. I want to talk to you about four different kinds of cryptocurrency because they get their value in different ways. Cryptocurrency is essentially an electronic token that is online. It is recorded in something called Blockchain which becomes important. Everyone’s been hearing about Blockchain, but all Blockchain really is if a series of blocks of data that are chained together through the path, so that you can always see future and past transactions. It’s distributed. A whole bunch of different people have their copies of it which means that independently, it is validated. It’s really hard to make any changes to it. That gives you some security, there’s a whole bunch of things going on in that. I don’t really want to get into the internals of how it works.
Where does it get its value comes from one of four kinds. One kind of cryptocurrency is a currency token. Bitcoin is the grandfather of this. Bitcoin gets its value really from supply and demand. There’s a certain amount of supply and because it can be used to buy things, because you can cash in Bitcoin relatively easy, it’s become in-demand. Now that demands has changed a lot through the years, there was a lot of knock on Bitcoin early because a lot of demand was from the dark web or from criminals because you can get paid in Bitcoin and nobody would know who you were.
That anonymity has gotten less over the past few years as people implement things like know your customer rules at exchanges, but there is a certain amount of anonymity to Bitcoin, and that was part of what drove the demand side of the supply-demand curve. There’s a number of currencies that are supply-demand sort of currencies, they’re using to buy. Bitcoin is an example.
Another one that I like to talk about is called Troptions which stands for Trade Options. There’s four or five little coins in the Troptions ecosystem and those were designed to be like a barter currency. It’s actually very interesting to talk about a barter currency, but rather than going into details there, let me not distract myself to my main point here. There are a bunch of currency tokens.
The second kind of token that you might be interested in is security tokens. These actually are representations of value. It’s like issuing a stock. Instead of doing an IPO for a company, you might do an ICO; the Initial Coin Offering instead of an Initial Public Offering. When you offer a security token, that might actually represent partial ownership in a company, or it might represent a partial ownership of a piece of real estate, or a piece of art, or a yacht, or whatever’s out there. You can actually have an asset or you can have a company that has value. The security token represents that value.
To do that, you have to be very aware and comply with all this SEC Securities Laws if you’re in the US, and all the other countries’ security laws if you’re not. Essentially, a security token is another way of issuing stock without going through a lot of the rigmarole for some of the stock exchanges.
Clint: When you’re talking about these stuff though, I’m thinking of fluctuation. You’re issuing the stuff but where is its value? Where does it come from? Because I’ve seen it where it’s up at $20,000 and then a couple of weeks later it’s down to $6000. I’m like, “Wow, if I’m the one investing at $20,000 and I lost that much in value, why would I ever want to get involved with this?”
Steve: That’s with the currency tokens. I understand that that have happened and it could happen and there’s a lot of fluctuations and volatility because we have people speculating on the tokens. The reason why you might want to have it is because you have a real serious problem with actual currency, things like dollars and euros. Every single year, your dollar is going to be worth 2.5%-3% less. It is actually by public policy that inflation is managed at about 2.5%-3% which really if you include the things that they leave out of the equation measure, things like oil and some of the other consumables out there, inflation is often higher than 2%-3%.
That buying power of that dollar gets less every single year. The buying power of the cryptocurrency is not intentionally devalued. It certainly these days has more volatility but at some point, I think those cryptocurrencies are going to settle down, and they’ll be a really good store of value so that one year to the next, your value might be the same or go up whereas with the dollar, you’re absolutely guaranteed with yen, the euro, Yuan, or anything else. You’re absolutely guaranteed that your purchasing power is going to be less every single year.
Right this minute, with all the volatility that’s out there, it’s kind of harder to make the case that this will be a store of value, but that was one of the reasons we’re trying to have cryptocurrencies, was to maintain the stored value. An appropriately done cryptocurrency can be done with that. This might be a point to actually talk about these trade currencies. Troptions for example was intended to be a Blockchain version of an exchange barter currency. There had been barter currencies for decades. Things like the International Trade Exchange or ITEX was one of the bigger ones.
Somebody would issue a piece of paper certificate and then say, someone like Clint Coons, who wanted to be able to participate in this might say, “Okay, I’m going to contribute 2000 hours of my legal services,” maybe 10 years ago, we charge $100 an hour would probably be the charge back then—it’s probably more than that back then—but let’s say 10 years ago, I charge $100 an hour. I’m in 2000 hours, let me get it to $200,000 or something like that, whatever that is. Then you could issue this currency.
Now, you have to be able to redeem those hours with an ITEX dollar. Today, you might charge $1000 an hour for that same hour, but that ITEX currency would still be at the $100 an hour, whatever they had would be worth one hour of your time. If you have that, and a plumber does that, an electrician does that. Now, you can get plumbing services, electrician services, you’re buying through that ITEX currency, and now you’ve kind of fixed some of your costs through all the things that you can trade forward in the ITEX trade range which is stored value.
Clint: You have that value though, but the question is how do you take that value then and bring it into the everyday marketplace where you could then realize that, rather than having it locked up on these or just trading with people within that community. Before you go into that answer for us, we got to take a quick break and we’ll come right back we’ll hit that question.
Hey everyone, it’s Clint Coons here. Welcome back to the Anderson Business Advisors podcast. We just finished up talking with Steve. We’re finished up on these different cryptocurrencies and how they work. He was telling us about them and then we’re going to move into how you can actually apply those to real estate.
Steve, why don’t you just finish that up about those cryptocurrencies and let’s talk about how you can use it as a real estate investor; how a real estate investor should be interested and they need to know about this.
Steve: Sure. As a real estate investor, there’s a couple of different ways that you might want to be looking at cryptocurrency. The first is buying real estate with cryptocurrency. If you actually invest in cryptocurrency and it went way up, now you have a big asset that you want to diversify into other kinds of assets then real estate is a great place to do that. I got into real estate actually by trading lands for cryptocurrency directly which is interesting. It’s hard to do it directly, most people will just cash out and then buy the property but you can actually trade land for cryptocurrency and there might be some issues if you do that, but those would be details that I’ve been working right here.
Clint: Did you pay tax?
Steve: I acquired the cryptocurrency in the transaction. I don’t have to pay tax on the cryptocurrency, I’d to pay tax in the capital gains for the land.
Clint: Alright, go on.
Steve: Absolutely, if you do buy land with cryptocurrency or a property with cryptocurrency, the appreciation of that cryptocurrency would be a taxable event. Let’s talk about a way that you can maybe not have that happen to you. Another way might be to get a loan secured by your cryptocurrency. There are lenders out there right now who will give you a loan. It’s kind of like stock margin loan where they’ll give you a loan at 50% of the value of the cryptocurrency. Now, you can take that loan and go buy real estate. Since you haven’t sold the cryptocurrency, I think you might agree that that wouldn’t be a taxable event for you, but you’re the expert on that, not me.
Clint: No, you’re absolutely correct. If I’m going to do that, I’m going to use my cryptocurrency as collateral. Would I give them a thumb drive with all the Blockchains or the coins on it?
Steve: That’s a really good question. There are places now that will act as escrow companies who will hold a cryptocurrency for you. One of the big ones is called Prime Trust. It’s an online bank and so they will hold cryptocurrency in escrow for clients, or for loans, or for whatever. That’s one way to do that. That way, that cryptocurrency is held in a third party wallet that has all the right sort of security, all the right bells and whistles to make it all work, but that’s a really good point there.
Clint: Okay.
Steve: There’s some other ways to do this with real estate in cryptocurrency. A lot of the more advanced investors will turn to a syndication as a way of raising money for larger deals. Well, you can use a security token kind of cryptocurrency as a way of having the ownership of that syndication to be represented. You do all the private placement memorandum, you do the syndication, you’re registered with the SEC, you have an escrow agent who can help hold things like Prime Trust or whatever you want to use, and then you actually issue your own crypto coin, and that coin represents ownership in that piece of property. Now, why would you want to do that?
Clint: That’s another one there.
Steve: One reason might be liquidity because if you can make sure that you follow all the SEC regulations for trading—which there are many—you still would actually be able to have your investors trade those sorts of coins a lot easier than they can trade some sort of abstract interest in a property. There are ways to give your investors better liquidity by doing this property tokenization approaches. There are some companies out there now that help support and provide you all the information you need to do that property tokenization. I think it’s going to be an advanced form of syndication if you can do it for real estate.
Clint: Are there people doing that right now?
Steve: People are doing that right now. There’s a lot of the projects that are sort of in beta testing, or they’ve done one, or they’ve done a couple. There are a couple of companies, the biggest one that I’ve seen is called Polymath and they do that more—the business have probably done it more than most folks. There’s a couple of others. I actually have a conversation setup tomorrow with some other groups that are doing this. It is emerging. I would not say that it is fully realized everywhere yet, but it is being done and it is being proven out. Certainly, within the next six months to a year, I suspect it will become a place, and I suspect within the next 3-5 years, it’ll be the primary way of doing it.
Clint: Okay. That’s interesting. You can do a syndication. What about then on the rental side if I own a rental property? Could I collect rents? I mean do tenants come up to you or offer to you, “Hey, are you in cryptocurrency?”
Steve: Well, that is actually a very interesting question as well because that’s one of the things I did want to talk about. Many companies now are starting to accept some cryptocurrencies for payments and that’s seeing how that might appeal to millennials. It will make your property appear cool, and updated, and modern. Being able to accept money in a very easily liquidatable cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum could be a very good idea for your student housing, for your apartment complexes, for your self storage, those are all really good ideas.
Clint: Well, why would millennials have cryptocurrency though? Why do you think that is?
Steve: I think they believe it’s cool; that it’s the wave of the future. There’s a lot more interest there, they’re more accustomed to dealing digitally with everything else. A lot of them don’t carry cash, all they have is a credit card. What’s a credit card? It’s essentially dollar tokens available to you through an electronic means. What’s your bank account now? It’s dollar tokens. It’s a dollar token in a register on your bank. You don’t see the actual dollars in the bank anymore. They don’t have piles of cash lying around, these are all electronic record entries which is just like cryptocurrency in many ways.
Clint: If I were to accept rents in cryptocurrency, I guess the question I would have is A, number one, how do I get paid in crypto from someone? How would they transfer to me? And B, because of the fluctuations that you’ve brought up, I don’t want to hold on to it, I want to cash it in right away, so then how do I turn around and convert that back to US dollars?
Steve: The basis of doing cryptocurrency is if you hold your currency in something called a wallet. It’s a metaphor, a digital metaphor. You have your currency in a wallet. Your wallet has an address which is a big long string of letters and numbers. Now, that address is something that’s called a public key. You actually have a private key as well that you have to protect but the public key is the thing that’s out there. You give that address and anybody can send you cryptocurrency to your account but they can’t get into your account. They can just see that address to send to you.
Essentially, you give your address to your tenant, they send you the cryptocurrency—that’s the one part. The second part is how do you actually sell it if you were to get thousands of dollars right away. There are a number of exchanges out there, think of them like stock exchanges where you can trade crypto for crypto, and many of them you can trade crypto for what they call Fiat currency which is what we think of those dollars, and Euros, and yen, whatever. If there’s enough market where you have people buying that cryptocurrency, you can go to one of these exchanges, offer it for sale, and essentially someone will trade you the dollars and those dollars just appear in your bank account.
Clint: Okay. Would you recommend someone do that then if they were going to accept currency? What type of safeguard should I have in place if I wanted to work with a tenant in that manner? If they came up to me and they offered to pay me in cryptocurrency.
Steve: You want to make sure that you’re getting the right dollar amount when they pay you. But that’s pretty simple because in most of these exchanges they can say, “I want to spend this dollar value of cryptocurrency to this person,” and they’ll use the price at that moment to make that exchange. When you do it right, you would have you currency risk. If they send you the Bitcoin and it goes down before you sell it, you’ve lost some money. If it goes up before you sell it, you’ve made some money over and above your rent. Depending on whether you’re bullish or bearish on cryptocurrency, on that particular cryptocurrency, you might actually hold it for a little while, and see if you could end up getting more out of it than you would have with the rent. If you’re bearish, obviously want to sell as soon as possible.
Clint: Okay. There isn’t any problem then since they’re trading it through an account that’s handling all the protections, tracing the funds, knowing who it’s coming from because as you brought up earlier, there has been a little bit of a stigma to it. I was watching the show Billions on Showtime and one of the ways Axe was paying people is in USB sticks with crypto on them. If they did something for him he’s like, “Here you go, untraceable funds.” Of course, you wouldn’t want to be associated with that, so those exchange help fix that problem.
Steve: Well, the exchange is going to help fix that problem. Any exchange that ties to US dollars or any other Fiat currency implements know your customer rules just like any other bank does. All the exchanges that are dealing with an actual currency do that. If the exchange is only crypto to crypto that don’t necessarily do the they know your customer and anti-money laundering rules.
Clint: Okay. That would be a little bit scary. Alright, well how about buying a property then? When you talked about going back to that if I wanted to purchase real estate or sell real estate, it can be the same process. I need to set up one of these accounts with an exchange and then somebody then would transfer me the money into that account once I’ve shown it, then escrow would have to be tied into that I’d assume. Wouldn’t that just throw escrow off if you’re being paid in crypto? Are they set up to work with this currency?
Steve: They are not setup to work with it yet. When I did my property exchange exactly like this, we had to sit down and lay out what would happen when. “This happens first, and then this, and then this,” in order to make the exchange all happen. We did something like this. We had the seller sign the deed for the real estate and hold an escrow in the title company. Then we sent the cryptocurrency to the seller’s wallet, and then once that was received, and we can show that that was received, then the title is recorded.
It’s a 2-3 step process but that’s what they do now anyway because they’re looking for wired funds and making sure all those distributions happen. You have to actually work out what’s going on when with the cryptocurrency. It’s really not that hard; it’s just a matter of being intentional about it and there’s different ways of proving it. There are other issues with the sale but I’m not sure we can go into all those details on this. I’m certainly happy to discuss that as follow-on with anybody, but things like getting title insurance can be a challenge.
Clint: Yeah, so how does that work though? Because that is something that would come up, I would imagine.
Steve: Yeah. With the transaction ideas, we could not find the title insurance company that would do the title insurance at closing. We did title insurance with the after close. Now, you just owned a property and you get title insurance, it’s really no different. Since then, I have found the title company that will do this at closing. I think, certainly within the next year or so, I think there will be even more.
Clint: Got it. I guess it’s like anything that as it starts to gain more acceptance, then you’re going to see more people willing to transact business in that because I’ve seen some ebb and flows with this. I remember a couple of years ago when crypto was really hot in Las Vegas, you could use that to get your dog groomed, go out to dinner. When it pulled back, you saw several of these establishments, they no longer would accept it. You’d call them up, “Do you accept crypto?” “No, we no longer accept that.” I guess, I see that side of it that there’s some risk there, but there’s also the gain aspect that you’ve stated, it’s like investing in real estate. It may go up. “If I collected crypto off one of my properties, I’m also wondering, maybe in three years, this goes from the $6000 it’s worth now per coin up to $20,000 and I cash out then. I just really increased the return on my investment.” Is that kind of the way you look at it with your investing?
Steve: I do. In fact, I think there are ways to hedge your risks on that. Maybe you hold some of it, have it go up and you sell some others to get cash. Think of it like you would do with your stock where you might have insurance on the stock. You have twitch and calls and those sorts of things. You might say, “Okay, I’m going to sell if it goes down to here. I’m going to sell this much if it was on here or if it goes up this much, I’m going to sell so much and take profits off the table.” You can do a lot of the strategies that you do with stocks which are also pretty much a speculation market sort of like cryptocurrency has become in some ways.
I think there will be a lot of cryptocurrencies that will be very stable. I think security tokens, that actually represent ownership of a piece of property, the value of those of those crypto currencies will be based on the value of the property, just like the value of your shares would be in the LLC that owns property, if we did it that way. There’s every reason to think those would be completely safe. There’s other kinds of things you can do with cryptocurrency as well, which we haven’t talked about, but we’ll touch on briefly. You can actually do your whole buying process on the web using cryptocurrency tokens. Your contract you can actually be captured in a cryptocurrency token on the web.
There are some companies out here now, Propy is one that actually list real estate, allows you to accept cryptocurrency for your real estate if you want to, and they claim to do the whole buying process, end-to-end, online, using cryptocurrency. There’s another company called ShelterZoom, which does all the contract negotiations online, and they have something called metric contracts that goes with them, that allows you to do the whole contract process online.
These have some potential interesting advantages for real estate in that you can have everybody have the latest version of the contract simultaneously by using this as a cryptocurrency. You could speed transactions tremendously in real estate by going to this digital approach, and then the actual contract itself, anybody who has access to that token can see exactly what the final contract says. There’s no disagreement or argument.
Similar to that, you can put real estate title on the Blockchain. Would be nice if anybody anywhere search the title by going to Blockchain, and you could search all the way back, and it would be immutable and that no one could go and change that, or remove that, or do anything to that title. There’s some examples with that right now, Cook County near Chicago was doing a pilot for doing that. I think the Republic of Georgia was doing a pilot for doing a backup of all their real estate title on a Blockchain. There’s a lot of folks looking at that stuff, and you can do similarly, MLS Multiple Listing Service, listing through the Blockchain, and then those would also be up there, and searchable and available to people in the Blockchain next to that.
There’s a number of different possibilities for Blockchain and cryptocurrency to interact with real estate even beyond the buying and selling with cryptocurrency, which I’m very interested in, or other security token where you might do the actual syndication on the Blockchain.
Clint: I get what you’re saying is, that it’s new, it’s up and coming, and that it may be something in the future that people, when they see the benefit, and how fast transactions can take place in the security, because if you watch the news, or you read Wall Street Journal, or any publications, there has been this talk of Blockchain technology as the wave of the future. That it has a high degree of encryption and protection for any transaction that takes place in it or data that’s transmitted. It might be something that people would want to be aware of, and I think they should, because as it grows in acceptance, you’re going to be faced with it. If you’re not taking the understanding that you don’t know how to converse in it, you may lose out on opportunities.
Steve: You’re absolutely right. Even just putting Blockchain in your name, I think I heard about one company, they weren’t doing very well, they put Blockchain in their name, and the value of their stock tripled overnight, even though they didn’t change the company at all. You have to be careful, the term Blockchain is very hot, but it is just the technology, and it isn’t a silver bullet that solves all your problems.
The other thing I’ll also for about Blockchain, and I think this is kind of important to listeners to know. The things you’re talking about, all these damages to have Blockchain, the immutability, the cryptography—all these are on there—are really available for the public Blockchain. That means that there’s all kinds of people around the world, who are maintaining the Blockchain, so nobody can go in and change it. But if a company has its own private Blockchain, even if they have 1000 copies of it somewhere, they can just decide to go in and change all their Blockchain.
A private Blockchain doesn’t necessarily have all the properties that you really like in the Bitcoin Blockchain. It’s something to be aware of, as you going forward, Blockchain isn’t a silver bullet in of itself, it has to relate with a couple of other pieces of its overall approach that make it work. Bitcoin is by far the most successful at putting all the pieces together to make it all work.
Clint: Wow. Now, there’s a lot here, I know, you were getting into that that there’s this different currencies. If somebody’s listening on this, and they want to get a hold of you, to go into this in more detail, are you open to that?
Steve: Absolutely. I’m becoming a little bit of an evangelist about this, because I think there’s so much to do here with real estate. Real estate is kind of a low hanging fruit for cryptocurrency to make some really substantial improvements in a very short time. I’m also starting to work on a book, because I haven’t seen all of these aspects of the real estate pulled together, so I’m working to put that book together. Probably by this fall, it will be released, and have a kind of an overview of how all the different ways real estate and cryptocurrency can interact.
Clint: Great, so how would they get a hold of you then?
Steve: The easiest way is the email, steve@streetsmartinvestmenstllc.com. My website is www.streetsmartinvestmentsllc.com. You can go to my domain, and sign up for a newsletter, or you can send me an email directly, and I’ll make sure that we can have an interaction there. That’s probably the best way to get started.
Clint: Great. Well, Steve, I want to thank you for being on today in sharing this new and upcoming opportunities with cryptocurrency in real estate. I hope some people reach out to you, and get their questions answered because, as I stated, until you when I met, I really didn’t know that much about it, I just knew enough and probably can be dangerous, but you’re telling me that there are different ways to do things now with real estate and cryptocurrency. It’s kind of piqued my interest, especially coming out of talking to my friend, who’s in charge of that bankruptcy trustee, that attorney, I see there’s some real money to be made in it. It’s changed my way of thinking. I want to thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast. Is there any parting comments you’d like to make?
Steve: Well, I appreciate the invitation to talk with you about this. I’m very interested in this. Cryptocurrency have had some ups, and had some downs, but its demise has been way overpredicted. I think it’s going to be around in the next five years, 10 years, I think the world’s reserve currency will be a cryptocurrency. There’s going to be a lot of things going on in cryptocurrency over the next few years, and it helps to stay ahead of the curve, and figure out the best way to impact your own business.
Clint: Great. All right everyone. Steve gave out his information. You can reach him at streetsmartsinvestmentsllc.com or steve@streetsmartinvestmentsllc.com. Again, Steve, thanks for being on. Everyone who is still listening on, I wish you the very best with your real estate investing. Take care everyone.
