Introduction - Why This Book and Why Now

In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.

- Albert Einstein

Speech, content, math, code, and money are converging. They are mental constructs humans symbolize as characters on a page or a screen. We take this symbolic transmutation of cognitive concepts into value for granted, but in fact each of these is the same thing at one level - abstractions of human design. Before, we saw code, math, and speech converging in software applications, cryptography, and web design. Now, money is fully converging with this construct. As a result, many of us are rethinking how we view the digital life of money.

I view the two most important factors of successful investing to be great timing and strong, educated conviction. Sometimes the timing aspect of investing is lucky. No one wants to rely on luck when managing their money. If you want to incorporate timing into a systematic investment thesis, create great timing through smart, impactful research. Watch for what's going to be successful in the future instead of trying to invest in what's worked in the current past. Markets change over time. As conditions evolve, successful strategies lose their advantages. If you are analyzing current returns and are following a strategy that is producing outsized returns, then I think most of the time you are too late. I see so many investors in the equities markets searching for mutual funds with a strong 12-month performance in beating the market benchmark. But if you're a new investor getting in at that point, it's already too late. Outsized returns have been made. This is why I never want to analyze past returns as a part of my decision-making process for a future investment strategy. Instead, I want to understand market cycles to figure out where we are and then where we're going. This book will show you how finding and following market cycles is key to producing outsized returns.

The second important aspect to exceptional investing is to have conviction in what you're investing. Especially when it comes to understanding new innovation or technology, you gain conviction by learning, researching, and digging deeper into a particular domain to gain expertise. In this book, you will learn why cryptoasset investing is so transformational and how to invest using systems and processes that remove emotion from the equation. I will explain the world of crypto markets and lay out easy-to-understand strategies and tactics for investing in crypto assets while showing you, the investor, what risks to manage and how to manage them.

We Are Marching Toward Two Worlds

Right now, the majority of the world is walking into a trap. They're walking into a world where every single action they do, online or offline, is being monitored, tracked, and surveilled. The tools are becoming better and better and the amount of data tracking the population is staggering. If you have Google's Gmail, they are reading your emails and the emails you send to others in an effort to better target advertising. They use Google Maps for location data. Your phone is spewing out geolocation data to more third parties than most even realize. And there are data aggregators that are collecting all this information to sell to anyone for a price. Your privacy is going the way of the dinosaur.

It's worse in some other countries. In China, they have a social scoring system that tracks all aspects of your behavior and your financial life. If you are using your mobile phone for payments through Alipay and other services, every single financial transaction is being tracked by the government. They know where you are. They know what you purchase. They know vast amounts of medical information about you. In China, this can affect whether you can buy a train ticket or upgrade to first class or not. There are over 50,000 cases of Chinese citizens who couldn't book travel because they had outstanding debts. Depending on where you live, a comfortable, lazy approach will land you living in a world of surveillance capitalism or a world of a surveillance state.

There are Chinese citizens who are having the sum of all their public actions reduced to a social score. There are American citizens who have their email surveilled to improve e-commerce opportunities for companies willing to pay. Google partnered with Mastercard, so now Google can view all your financial transaction data. It's the aggregation of all your health, online, and financial data that's bringing about a future I suspect none of us truly want. What I am describing is only the beginning. You have a choice.

Do you want to own your own data or are you going to let it own you? Blockchain and crypto assets allow for us to create a different future. One where you own and control your own data. One where you cannot be tracked, at least not as easily. One where you could get paid for allowing access to your data. These technologies provide tools for anyone to reclaim their privacy. In this book we offer a reason and a way for taking back control of your financial life such that your life is farther away from a surveillance state and closer to financial autonomy.

Where We Are in the Current Economic Cycle

The globe is currently in a tricky spot in the current economic cycle. In 2020, we're in a transition period. Countries are laden with debt. The United States has $28 trillion in public debt with $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities that include Social Security and Medicare.1 We are currently in a period of slowing growth coupled with the potential of inflation - and this is driving global central banks to take a dovish stance as they are worried about deflation. We are transitioning into slower growth as the potential of inflation starts to accelerate and so this changes the market dynamic. Global central banks will start to take a more neutral monetary stance as they worry about stagflation. This all drives toward the next aspect of the cycle that I think we're all most worried about, which is the next major recession or downturn in the market. When the next major downturn comes, the Federal Reserve and all global central banks will not have any ability to increase stimulus in the system. No traditional monetary solutions will be available to governments because they've been used up and not replenished. Quantitative easing (QE) has been used for too long. Interest rates are already low or zero, depending on the country. Many developed nations have negative-yielding sovereign debt, so what are they going to do? Push rates even lower? This means that our governments' only option will be fiscal reform, but that takes time, especially in the polarized political world we live in today. The easiest option will be to print more money and give it directly to the people. At the end of all this, we're going to see a public debt crisis - this is an opportunity for those who are informed about alternatives.

Investing in the New Technological Revolution

My investment thesis is based on 100 years of proven economic theory. As we've learned, short-wave economic cycles, those 5- to 10-year cycles, are driven by credit, but the long-wave economic cycles, those 50- to 60-year cycles, are driven by technological revolution. We've had five cycles over the past 200 years - the Industrial Revolution, steam/railways, electricity/city electrification, oil/autos, and the last wave, which was the Age of Information with the Internet.2 These long-wave economic cycles drive market forces and investment over decades. Being able to spot them early is advantageous.

Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and cryptocurrency are converging to deliver a new technological revolution. We've already seen evidence of this. For the past 10 years AI, IoT, and robotics have been delivering new solutions that drive automation. That has been valuable, but it has not been transformational. There has been no driving force requiring a paradigm shift in how businesses operate.

Cryptocurrency was the last piece of the puzzle. It allows for generating, processing, and transferring economic value without the need for human intervention. As these technologies converge, they are bringing about a new age, what I call the Age of AutonomyT. Once this technological innovation reaches a tipping point, businesses around the world will push to reconstitute themselves, once again, just like they did during the last technological revolution in the Age of Information (aka the Internet Age). It's that competition that's a key driver to technology adoption and the force that drives global adoption. In the future, businesses and organizations that do not have autonomous operations simply will not be able to compete with those that do because autonomy is the ultimate competitive advantage. In this book I will show you why cryptocurrency is the mechanism that will unleash the wealth-building value of these technologies in our digital age and how you as a crypto investor can prosper.

The Push Toward Autonomy

With the advent of blockchain technology, we've begun a new long-wave economic cycle driven by a new technological revolution. Individuals, corporations, and organizations are pushing for greater autonomy, agency, and sovereignty. Management analysts, political gurus, and trend watchers all agree that AI is the tech frenzy of our time. Companies are feverishly developing AI for improvement in all sorts of systems, from e-commerce to...