What makes blockchain universal is how it can be implemented for just about anything anywhere. Penetrating even to real estate, it proves its own flexibility and adaptability when it comes to transactions, record keeping, asset management, and more. Taking us in between the two is Craig Cobb. He is the founder of Trader Cobb, a cryptocurrency trading and training firm, and a host of the top-ranked show, The Trader Cobb Crypto Podcast. He talks about blockchain technology and how the real estate industry could be benefitting from it, touching on topics from tokenization and the SEC to smart contract and title insurance.
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I did an episode on the blockchain and real estate and how those two things are connected and interact. If you think about it as the original internet, the blockchain is a revolution in technology that will touch all people and all businesses. For many real estate investors and professionals, this is part of the brave new and confusing world of technology. In its most simple sense, the blockchain is a series of computers with thousands to potentially millions of them that each keeps the same record of an event or transaction in a ledger that is open to the public. Each one of those records is encrypted, which means it’s all scrambled it cannot be read without the right key and the ledger is virtually hack-proof.
Since all these computers see the same thing, they offer consensus that the recorded event or transaction is valid. The most important value of the blockchain is that it allows two or more parties to interact with a financial transaction with no middleman. What makes the blockchain universal is how it can be implemented for just about any kind of transaction, record keeping or an agreement between one or more parties. From asset management or an investment perspective to operating and managing companies, blockchain technology could potentially have a profound impact on real estate. That can be seen by the number of companies that are already emerging with their feet firmly planted in blockchain. There are publicly-traded companies that are raising capital for blockchain technology.
There are opportunities for blockchain in many facets of real estate transactions. It includes a property entitled trust searches, financing, leasing, purchasing, selling and doing due diligence, managing cashflows, payment systems, payment management and cross border transactions. New definitions of property ownership and rental contracts are going to arise from all this and there’s going to be a shift in the way real estate and real estate business is conducted in this country. On this episode, I brought in a person who I’ve met based in Australia who specializes in blockchain, blockchain technology and teaching people about blockchain and blockchain technology and trading. With that, we’re going to have him on here.
If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Active Real Estate Investing with Joe McCall (Part 2).
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How Blockchain Could Transform Real Estate
It’s my pleasure to welcome Craig Cobb to the show. Craig is the Founder of TraderCobb, a cryptocurrency trading and training firm based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been a trader, an educator and a market commentator since 2007. Craig is also a globally sought-after international speaker on the topics of financial markets, cryptocurrency, entrepreneurship and trading. He’s also the host of the top-ranked show, The TraderCobb Crypto Podcast. Craig, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Marco.
You’re in Sydney.
I’m in Bondi Beach.
My understanding is it’s a very expensive market.
The market here is insane. We are seeing it cool a little bit. It’s native because the higher we go, the higher we fall. We see that in many markets around the world. I was just talking about buying a 550 square meter block with a little house in Bondi Beach up to of $3.5 million and you’ve got to put a couple of hundred thousand to renovate it. There’s no ocean, there’s no pool and there’s nothing exciting. That’s the reality of Sydney right now.
That almost makes San Francisco, California sound affordable. That’s not the case.
Toronto had a walled property run as well. Hong Kong is the most expensive globally per square meter, then Sydney is second.
Toronto is definitely very expensive. Vancouver Canada is very expensive. San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Sydney and some of these major international cities are unbelievably expensive. I don’t know how anybody can afford real estate there. It seems that it’s more of a speculator’s market than anything else.
Australians love property. The Baby Boomers have done extraordinarily well and they’ve hoarded and they hold property and the property keeps going up. It’s like any market dynamic. If there’s not much supply and high demand, we see the market move. We’ve seen that over the last decade where property prices in Sydney alone more than doubled in less than ten years. It has been a wild ride. The next generation is pretty much a generation of renters, unless we can find another way. We’re working on that.
To say that it’s unsustainable is an understatement. You just can’t appreciate that much for that long and expect there to be any significant amount of affordability. I see a very big correction coming in a lot of these markets.
Coming back to history repeating itself, look at Ireland and Spain back when they had their massive falls. Lending in this country is much more regulated. It’s not as easy. When I was living in London during this period, I was getting phone calls left, right and center. Barclays Bank and HSBC were trying to give me money like, “We have £1 million. We have £2 million.” I’m like, “I don’t want £2 million. I don’t need it. I don’t want it.” They’re like, “Go buy a house.” I’m like, “I don’t want to go and buy a house right now. It’s not the right time for me to be buying.” Sure enough, soon after that, we saw market have that big tumble. London being one of the global centers of finance and business and the center of Europe, it has retained its value quite well, such as New York as well being one of those major cities. We’re one crisis away here in Australia from having a proper correction. That could just be something as simple as jobs diminishing and people not being able to afford their mortgages. That little tiny step and we’re going down hard.
You’re also in the lending space. You provide what we call in the US essentially, hard money loans and sometimes bridge financing. You’re also in that capital space. Let’s start off by you telling us a little bit about yourself. Give us your background, what you do, what your businesses are so that people can have a better perspective of where you’re coming from.
I started trading and buying stocks when I was sixteen through the help of my dad. I went to London and started trading. I learned to trade there. I worked with some amazing mentors all over the world. I’ve been to London, New York, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. I’ve been to all over the place working with some phenomenal traders. For the last couple of years, I’m stuck to the same three trading strategies. I use checklists because I’m an outgoing person and I’m a bit spontaneous. I like to have a good time. The problem is, if you bring that into the markets, the results are terrible. I’ve blown out three accounts myself and everything.
I’ve been working with big corporations for the majority of the time as a third party working for them. I’m contracted to the likes of ICE, TradeStation, CMC Markets, RJO Futures and a number of big names. I’m creating content and helping them with their education systems and whatnot. A few years back, I started a company with a friend of mine called Parkedge Capital and that’s an Australian-based company. We do short-term lending. We offer short-term funding facilities and also a joint venture facility as well for those that might not have the cash available at hand for them straight away. We’d like to take on certain projects. My dad has been a builder-developer. It’s been in my blood my whole life and that’s how the property mixes into it.
I’ve worked in the cryptocurrency and blockchain spaces where my big focus is now. We have the TraderCobb.com website to educate people on how to trade. I teach my checklists trading system so they’ve got some structure to go into the market. It’s not just about trading strategy, it’s about routine record keeping. I’m teaching people how to run a trading business as opposed to sitting there clicking buttons and hoping for the best. We’ve got a media company in the spaces in related news and we’re working on a few other projects as well. Part of what I do is the trading course, the education and the media side of it as well. You could say we’ve got our hands full.
You understand a lot about blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency space and you trade it. We both clearly see that blockchain technologies are penetrating their tentacles into the real estate space. I would want to start with the basic building blocks. Blockchain as technology is an ingenious invention. Anybody who understands it realizes that and it’s not the same as cryptocurrency or Bitcoin and this and that. Break it down in simple terms. What is the blockchain?
You said the building blocks. That’s what it is. Picture blockchain as building blocks. The thing with building blocks is that you can take a building block off. When something goes onto the blockchain, you put a building block on that can never come off the blockchain. Don’t think of that as a negative thing. Don’t think of that as things like a social media photo or something. It’s not like that. Let’s say I have my business information on the blockchain. One of these data mining companies like Facebook, they do mine a lot of our data and then they on-sell it. If it’s on the blockchain, I can decide where that goes.
Once I put my information on the blockchain, it can’t come off but I can amend it and I can change it. It’s an online distributed ledger where you can add to it, but you can never take it away. This is what creates a trustless society because you can’t cheat the system. Once something goes on, it stays there and there is a verification process that allows us to know that it happened. That’s why it’s doing a lot of big things. It’s not just in the property but in most sectors, especially if you talk about freight. No longer will you lose your freight because you know exactly where it’s gone and exactly what’s happened and there’s no human error. It’s a trustless online distributed ledger.
With blockchain technology, it’s going to be similar to the internet where it will be so commonplace that you forget that you’re using it. It’s just there and it’s not even a matter of turning it on and off. It’s always there. There’s a lot of information about how blockchain is going to transform real estate. How do you see the real estate industry benefiting or using blockchain technology?
I’ll add to what I said about blockchain. It’s that same with your car. You turn the key. If you’re not a mechanic, you don’t know how the car works. You know there’s an engine and then there’s piston unless you drive a Tesla. I’ve got no idea how that works but I’m happy about it. You don’t need to know how the engine works. You just need to know what it’s used for. This is a good analogy for blockchain right now. It can be quite complex in trying to understand the way it goes about. Forget it because you don’t need to know exactly how the blockchain works unless you want to build a project using blockchain, which you may do. How is blockchain going to change the way real estate operates? It’s already happening through the use of security tokens. There are tokens that are listed on a market on an exchange. You buy this token, but you’re not buying equity into that particular company. You’re buying a token that is associated with something with that company. With a security token, you are owning part of whatever it is that is being securitized. On October of 2018, there was an $18 million US raised for a chunk of a hotel in Aspen.
This company did a crowd raise from accredited investors in the US for $18 million and they went and bought this share of this hotel. The beautiful thing about this is it opens up an entirely new market. If you were to buy this hotel, it’s $250 million to $300 million. I can forget about it right now. I am not going to go and spend $300 million on a hotel in Aspen, but I might put $50,000 into it if I had the opportunity to do that. One, it gives us access to markets that might previously be out of our range so we can have a more diverse property global portfolio. Two, one of the biggest issues with real estate is that it’s so liquid.
As we spoke, you might be sitting there on after the costs of holding the property, your tenants and renovations, whatever the costs are. Then you’ve got to sell it. Your capital gains, you’re paying your taxes, your estate agents, you’re advertising. Even if you still got a big chunk of profit there, because of the absolute rigmarole you’ve got to go through, you might not make the decision to sell it. It was the right decision at the time but because of the process, you might not have sold it. If it’s a security token with a liquid market of buyers and sellers, you can sell half of that now the second you want it. It allows you to make your portfolio more liquid to be able to move into other asset classes and build a truly liquid real estate property portfolio. That is where it’s going to transform real estate in a big way.
Tokenization is what you’re talking about and that splits assets into tokens that are ultimately stored on the blockchain. It sounds like syndication or securitization of an asset. Instead of having corporate shares or membership units in a limited liability company or a limited company in Australia or in Canada, you’re essentially buying shares or units of interest. Wouldn’t that be considered security? Wouldn’t that be considered something that falls under the jurisdiction of the SEC?
It is regulated. A security token is a security. You can get dividends from that. Let’s say you’ve got a high yield. With the Aspen property that I was talking about, they’re renting out rooms for X amount. You’re going to get a yield from that. It’s under Securities Law, which gives it that level of credibility, which is what we want. It gives it that regulation as well. In the past, they’ve not been regulated, many of these tokens. Because of that, there have been some nefarious dealings that have gone on and there have been some people that have lost some money. For a big part, it’s given a lot of people that might have been sitting on the fence about these blockchain and crypto asset markets. They might have thought, “I don’t know enough about it so I’m going to leave it alone.” With the security-based token, especially with real estate, it’s giving credibility into a tokenized economy. It’s going to be the way of the future and it sets the stepping stones. It’s going to take some time for that to take off. It took a bit of time for the internet. Look at the first people that were involved. Look at what the people did that had the foresight. We’re still very early on at the dawn of time as far as this industry goes and it’s got a big future.
Security usually takes some licensing to be able to trade, not necessarily to buy. What kind of regulations are going to fall into place here? If I’m the average Joe and I have a portfolio of three to twelve houses or whatever, how do I take advantage of tokenization? How do I use the blockchain to liquidate 10% of my holdings because I want to liquidate those funds to invest in something else? Maybe I want to put it into crypto or something.
You’ve got a big audience. You’ve taught a lot of people and a lot of people had a lot of property through your teachings and they’re doing well with it. You know what you’re doing and you’re good at teaching it. Let’s say that within your syndicate, you’ve got 100 properties in 30 of the states across the US. You’ve got 100 people that opt-in to be a part of this tokenized economy that you’re going to create, you’re going to run, you’re going to manage and your properties will be in there as well. What you can do is pull them all together and then you go and create that company. Take and get the correct licensing and everything you need within your jurisdiction to then list that token on and exchange. There’s got to be a marketing drive in there as well. You’ve got to let people know about it. You’ve got to make sure that people are aware that this market exists, that your offering is available and what differentiates your offering.
Maybe you’ve got 30% of properties in this particular area, which is a high growth area. Maybe you’ve got a more percentage over here in a high yield area. You’ve got to work out what type of investor you are looking for as well and you’ve got to build that business around it. The core starts with a grouping of properties, the business entity, then the marketing. Let people know it’s available and then people start to come into that project, start to buy and sell. You’ve created a market within your existing portfolio or group of people with their portfolios and now it’s a liquid asset class. The other beauty of it is your investors or the people putting their properties in, they’ll trade within themselves as well anyway.
If they make sure it works, they might go and liquidate some of their properties to buy the tokens. It might continue to spiral and grow. It brings a new market in. If you’ve got a 25-year-old sitting in Wisconsin right now. He has $5,000. He is interested in investing in a property. He might be getting minimum wage and a couple of tips. He’s thinking, “It’s not going to happen for a long time.” This tokenized economy allows this individual to go, “I can get onto the property ladder. I just have to do it in a different way.” You don’t have to own the entire house. You can own a part of it. It’s like you don’t need to buy an ounce of gold, but you can buy a little bit of it. You don’t need to own a whole Bitcoin, you can buy a fraction of it. That’s the new market. That’s how it works. You’ve got to let people know what’s available.
Theoretically speaking, you could have one client who is rich and cash and some securities. I have two clients who have a portfolio of ten properties each. All three of those clients or students or investors could liquidate in whole or in part of that portfolio by tokenizing it. The three of them could literally exchange a percentage of their ownership with each other to further diversify, not only the asset class but the portfolio that they have geographically or otherwise.
Here’s the beauty of it. Because of where the smart contract works, things go on and don’t come off. You don’t have to go and pay the lawyers for all this. The way the smart contracts work, it goes on and it stays on. You’ve got a proof of where it’s gone from and where it’s going to with your wallet addresses. I’m not going into too much detail because I don’t want to confuse everybody but the further you look, the more you think, “I don’t even need to pay the lawyers.” No, you don’t have to because there are smart contracts there to facilitate that expensive part of the whole process.
Let me ask you one more question about the tokenization before we get to smart contracts because that’s a question that I wanted to ask you. Tokenization doesn’t happen on a stock exchange. It’s not like you can go to the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ and do this. It is still called an exchange but it’s a crypto exchange.
They’ve got new exchanges coming up for security tokens at the moment. The notable one is coming out of Malta. The CEOs of Australia set up one of Australia’s biggest brokerage platforms here. He resigned as being CEO of that and is now setting up the multi-digital exchange. Because it’s such an early stage in this ecosystem, there’s a lot of work still to be done. What I don’t want people to think is that they can just like, “Let’s go out and liquidate all of our properties or part thereof and let’s go and do this market.” There’s still a lot to be done. This is the future of what is coming. There are still things being done but because of the legitimacy of the regulation around the word security and the security token and the fact that it’s backed by an underlying asset class. Whether that be a business, whether that be a property, whether they are a commodity, it’s getting some momentum.
A lot of people might have seen the Bitcoin price over the last twelve months in Ghana. It has fallen a long way, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Blockchain is the sexiest word in business at the moment. It’s the new internet. Everybody is on it. It’s hard to recruit people in that space because there’s such high demand so it’s not going anywhere. The fact that prices are down right now, do you want to buy on the way up or do you want to buy when it’s nice and suppressed? You might not want to buy at all but if you do, it’s not a bad time to start investigating before it does its next move. I’m very confident that will happen. I don’t know when but I’ll be trading throughout that cycle for sure.
Smart contracts are very cool concepts because it has a virtually unlimited number of uses. In the real estate space, we have contracts, we have agreements, they’re on paper although now you know you can digitally sign an agreement. There are a lot of moving parts and there’s always at least one middleman. How does a smart contract work? What is it? How is it different? Where are we going to start to see them? What is a smart contract?
I’m not a tech wiz. That’s not my gig. I’m a trader, I’m a logical thinking human being. I’m not a coder. I don’t build websites. I don’t write code. You described all the middlemen and middle woman and middle people, eliminate all of those. You got this beautiful process because it is irrefutable. Once it goes onto the blockchain and the smart contract has been decided and exchanged, it’s irrefutable. You cannot say, “No, I didn’t do that. We’ve got to change.” It’s set in digital stone. Because of the ease of which we can do this, the cost is virtually nothing. It comes away. We see lots of platforms that are writing using smart contracts and proof of stake and proof of work that is in there in that space as well. I’m trying to explain it where it’s not too confusing. It does cut out the middleman. You can go forward but you can never take it off. Therefore, it’s trust list. You don’t need to have two lawyers in the arguing to say, “No, he’s right. No, she’s right.” It’s just there. It exists within a locked-in distributed ledger. It cannot be taken back. It can’t be hacked and it’s verified by multiple computers running the code.
Essentially you have a digital contract that has terms within that contract that need to be met. The buyer and the seller in a real estate transaction would have to meet every one of those terms exactly as specified in order for that contract to be valid. If we’re talking about the exchange of goods or services or money or property, until those terms are met every single one of them, that exchange is not going to go through. It’s essentially what a title company does now here in the US, but without the people having to shuffle paper and check each of those boxes. It’s done electronically.
It is the way of the future. It takes a lot of the annoyance. If you look at it properly, things haven’t changed much in the last 200 years. You’ve got paperwork, you’ve got to use your lawyer, you’ve got to use your bank. Most people would use a bank. You’ve got someone to sell it, then you’ve got to have a tenant. All these things haven’t changed at all and that’s the same with banking. A lot of it hasn’t changed at all. If you consider the taxi industry and what Uber did to taxi and what the search engine did to yellow pages or white pages or classifieds, these are all industries that got totally changed. They never saw it coming. They weren’t quick enough to respond and they got taken out.
Real estate and banking are two of the biggest industries in the entire world, both for employment and wealth and investing. All those three things, which is the three things that make the world go round. Revolutionize those three products by making them faster, more efficient and taking it back in our control as the people that are creating the market. That’s what we’re set out to do. Coming back to the security token as opposed to what’s out there on the smart contracts right now, because it’s a security and it’s regulated. Let’s say that I send my smart contract and you receive it and it’s there. It’s between a company and an individual.
If I don’t do a security token now, I’m not buying anything within the company. I’m buying a token that is associated with the company. If I’m buying a token that is associated with the company, I don’t have any say in the company. I don’t own any equity in that company. I don’t have any of the underlying asset. It means that the smart contract may be there but the company can go, “So what? Who’s going to do anything about it?” There are still issues right now. You bring that regulation in through the use of a security token and you can go, “If somebody says that to me, you can do exactly what they would do now outside of tokenization and go out to your local MP, your senator or government and go, “These guys are breaking the law.” You’ve got that back in your power again now. The smart contract with the regulation around the security tokens locks that up into a perfect little housing for this market to move and be legitimized.
I don’t know if you’re aware of this but in the US, we have title insurance here. Title insurance has grown to be a $15 billion revenue per year industry. There are a lot of title policies being written every year in the US. The whole idea of title insurance is to ensure that buyer has clear title and the property is free and clear of liens and debts. A lot of people see title insurance as being one of the biggest frauds out there. A lot of people will claim it’s unnecessary. If you have title on the blockchain and it’s essentially a smart contract, every time real estate is bought and sold, all the boxes are checked to make sure that there are no liens and debts and the title is clear. It almost renders title insurance and maybe even title companies completely useless. What do you see happening here? Will title insurance be the first major industry to get displaced or eliminated?
Once you start to see what this can do, once you start to understand the ramifications of the proper use of blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology and the regulation around that, look at what you’re coming out with. Don’t do it because it sounds perfect fit. There are a lot of things that we’re a long way off in this space. There are a lot of things that need to be developed. It’s going to take time and that’s the right way to do things so that people don’t get hurt people. People don’t get ripped off. Things grow slowly. Look at the Internet.com, the first one in 1993 or 1994. There are a lot of projects right then that had the right ideas, but they were too early like TheGlobe.com. I just watched Valley of the Boom, which is a little show on the rise of the internet. TheGlobe.com was trying to be the first Facebook. Facebook did a better Facebook one.
There’s a lot that needs to still be done. There are a lot of people doing a lot of building in this space. These entire industries are going to be wiped out, but there are also entire industries that are going to be created. The best thing about it is it’s all based on bringing it back to you, the individual. It’s not about big companies having these monopolies and running these legal frauds. It’s about individuals being able to have access to do things. You can be a one-man team if we can get everything into the place where we can effectively do it without having to involve everybody. That’s what this blockchain movement and crypto and all of this Bitcoin. That’s what the original vision was. We’re several years into Bitcoin now and we’re a couple of years into blockchain growth projects. It’s the projects that are building on the blockchain and trying to get that adoption going. In the next few years, we’re going to see a huge amount of products. It’s going to change the way that we do things. There are opportunities everywhere.
What other areas do you see in the real estate space being affected or displaced? Are there other low-hanging fruits in this industry for blockchain?
I’ve been focusing more on the investor because that’s what I do. I’m an investor and I’m a trainer. I’ve never been in real estate offering products as such. The only one I’ve got is the lending, but I’m sure that there would be. For me, it’s more about how we give access to a market that’s a blue ocean. There are a lot of people that have read Rich Dad Poor Dad that won’t be able to buy a house with the current system, but they want to be a part of it. They just feel left out. If we bring those people into the market, what’s it going to do? If we can build a bigger market faster, then all it should do is help to grow the economies of the world, grow the portfolios of the people invested and make it a much more transparent and distributed wealth, which we don’t have right now.
The rich get richer and the poor can’t catch up at speeds we’ve never seen before. My focus is how we can create that ecosystem where everybody can grow together. That’s part of why I’m doing the education with the trading side of things. You don’t need to have lots of money to be a trader. You don’t have to have a PhD. You don’t have to go to a university. You got to be taught exactly what to do in a step-by-step process. It’s much more interesting for me to focus on bringing that new blue ocean than focusing on the individual products just because that’s who I am. I’m sure there is a low-hanging fruit, but it’s not my focus at the moment.
There are a lot of people who want to get started in real estate investing. I’m thinking about those people who are new that we sometimes call newbies. They’re saving up to get their first down payment for their first property or maybe a down payment for their next property. They don’t have enough to buy that first or next property, but they have enough to maybe start investing in real estate through tokenization, through the blockchain. That might be a good thing. I’m trying to think of how this could be a bad thing. It’s not direct ownership or maybe it is, I’m not sure if you can consider that direct ownership because if you hold title to a piece of property, it is.
I would suggest that it will be very similar to that of owning a share. You own the number of shares that you own. You own the chunk of that fund that you own. That might be 0.00000001. You own that part and you are responsible for that part and you’ll get dividends based on that part. You’ll get your yield based on that part. I see security tokens being exactly the same in that regard and that’s the way this is being set up. For those that are considering it or you’re on the fence or maybe three or four years from your first deposit and you hope the market doesn’t get away from you, I would suggest to start looking at blockchain. Start googling things like security tokens, start learning about the space, jump on my podcast and listen to the people that I’m interviewing. Start to go down the rabbit hole. There’s a lot to learn. Don’t rush, take your time.
If you’ve got a small amount now, then it’s going to take you quite a while to build your portfolio to achieve your goals. With someone like you, Marco, I’m sure they’re going to be able to achieve those in shorter periods of time. If you can learn first what this security token space is about, you might find something that will surprise you. If the security token industry are going to securitize most things, most asset classes and you’re somebody that gets into this Aspen Hotel at an early stage. As that blue ocean market comes in, there’s a flood of new money that comes in. It takes the investment population from the top 0.5% and extends it to the top 10% of the world. That’s a ten-time growth market based on the percentage. If you’re holding some good security tokens in this wonderful Aspen property, its value went from $300 million to a billion. There are options around that as well. You’ve always got to be educated and know where you’re going to get your best bang for your buck with the smallest possible risk.
It could be argued that the blockchain and this technology and tokenization could affect every aspect of real estate. Not just title and title insurance and the escrow companies, but the securitization of the asset, inspections, homeowners’ associations and how they tie into properties. The benefits that come out of this are the transparency because it’s a public ledger so people can see what’s there, there’s transparency. It could eliminate or reduce the number of intermediaries, the people in the middle. Transactions would certainly happen faster. We eliminate the delay of human involvement. It happens almost instantly and hopefully, it lowers costs because the friction goes away. We’ll have a lot less cost in the transaction process.
From all those things that you said, you choose one of those and it’s great. If you add all of them together, you can see why so many people are putting so much time into building and developing in this space. When you explain it the way you did through those bullet points of positives for you as the individual and businesses can create this ecosystem that they’re going to profit from as well, you can see why this whole industry is gaining momentum. It’s not if, it’s when and it’s happening now.
When you talk about cryptocurrencies as a form of exchange, it’s built on blockchain technology. You think of the most famous one being Bitcoin. It was built on the more important thing. It’s not the cryptocurrency, it’s the blockchain technology that’s at the heart of it all. There are dozens if not hundreds of cryptocurrencies out there. There were even some that made an attempt at being focused exclusively on real estate. I invested in that one and it fell apart. The SEC went after them and they shut their doors and they had to refund everybody’s money back. Do you think cryptocurrencies themselves will ever be made part of real estate transactions? You deal on the Aussie dollar and we deal in US dollars. Is cryptocurrency going to be part of this equation?
It’s already being part of the equation. If somebody in Indonesia wants to buy into the Australian market. It might be difficult to send and wire and do all that bits and pieces. If it’s something like Bitcoin, one wallet to the next, you can send $1 billion if you want straight through and straight arriving into the wallet address and then I can bring that into Australian dollars in the way I go. If you consider the costs that it is to banks, if I say I’ve got $100,000 in my bank right now, I can’t just walk into the bank and go, “I want my $100,000 cash.” They’re like, “We don’t have that much in the bank right now.” You’re like, “It’s my money.” They’re like, “Yeah, but you can’t have it.”
The other thing that we saw in Australia with a lot of the Australian banks, if you were doing anything in crypto, they shut your bank account down. You’re like, “You’re regulating what I can do with my own money.” The banks have got far too much control. They’re too slow, they’re too expensive and it’s a pain in the ass. If you’ve ever done any travel, look at when you go from Australia to the US. To get money out, they’re charging me an arm and a leg. The spread on that is insane. It is hundreds of points away from the actual market and they hit you both sides of it.
It’s already happening, these cross-board transactions. For anyone who’s sitting there going, “The bad guy is a fraud.” That happens, but the US dollar is by far the biggest fraudulent nefarious dealings currency in the world. Because of the way that things are set up now, which is AML, Anti-Money Laundering and KYC, Know Your Client, any new accounts that opened, there’s this absolute transparency from wallet to wallet. If the federal bureaus of wherever you are wish to find you, they can. It’s already being used. It’s a method of transaction. The Millennial demographic use it a lot and have a big interest in the blockchain cryptocurrency.
For me, this is the next generation. It’s a big demographic. They’re educated. They’re the Baby Boomer’s kids. They’re the leaders of the future, the CEOs, the presidents, the prime ministers. They are all these people. They have got crypto on the brain. They are using it. They’re tech-savvy. They grew up with Instagram in their hand and Facebook on their computers. They are far more tech-savvy. They are open to change. They’re sick of watching all the old people with all the money. This is rolling out whether we like it or not. You might as well get on board and follow that massive demographic. Even if it takes a little bit longer, that alone is going to drive this because the young people don’t want the old people having all the control forever.
You have to adapt. You have to follow the change because change is the only constant. You have to go with the time. We are where we are and this is going to change. Blockchain is transforming real estate the way we know it. Some people see it coming, some people don’t but it’s going to affect all of us. Craig, it’s great stuff. I appreciate your time. Do me a favor, tell our audience how they can find you and get more information about what it is you do and the information you have.
Thanks very much, Marco. It’s been an absolute pleasure being on the show. I hope I’ve got a few people scratching their heads and opening their minds. A way to find more information on what I do is quite simple. It’s TraderCobb.com. We’ve got a bunch of free content there. Sign up there and you’ll get free courses from me. It’s pretty straight forward. At Facebook, you can follow me at Craig Cobb and on Twitter, @TraderCobb. We’ve got the YouTube page as well. The TraderCobb Crypto Podcast is where I interview a lot of big guests in the space. I interview some of the biggest names in our industry in the crypto and blockchain industry. You can find all the socials and everything on the website.
I find crypto very fascinating. It is part of our future and it is here now. Craig, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
It’s been an absolute pleasure, Marco. Thank you so much.
If you feel overwhelmed by the whole thing of blockchain and cryptocurrency, don’t worry about it. It is here and it is here to stay. It will change all industries. It’s something that we’re going to learn just like the internet was when we first heard about it and now it’s basically commonplace. It’s everywhere and it’s something we use every day of our lives. Thanks for joining us. If you haven’t already, please remember to subscribe and we will see you on our next episode.
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