How Digital Money Will Change Banking, Investing, and Your Future

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]finance, money, it's changing and it's changing rapidly. We're going from physical to digital. We've got uh cryptocurrency, we've got stable coins, we've got uh China already with a digital currency, the US talking about a digital currency. How does this all intersect and what do we do about it?

[00:00:21]Well, today on the Wealthbuilding Show, we have two experts who've actually written a book on this. the intersection, the new intersection of money, talking about the combination of the digital side and the old traditional finance side. And our guests today are Scarlett Sber and Donham Nurigadoo. And it's great to have both of you. Um I'm going to say your last name only once, Donham. So we're going to call you Dham from now on. Um but it is great to have you on the show.

[00:00:56]And if you would um both of you give us a little of your background because uh this is such a fascinating uh you know leading edge area of finance.

[00:01:05]>> Well first of all Tom thank you so much for having us. Dam in particular is a big fan of of the podcast. So we're excited to be on the other side of this.

[00:01:13]Awesome.

[00:01:14]>> So I am Scarlett Sber. I'm the chief strategy and growth officer here at Money2020 which is for those of you who don't know it's the largest fintech as in financial technology event that happens around the world. So if you know of a Davos or CES, very similar but focused on finance and technology which we're going to be talking about today.

[00:01:32]I'm an exer and it is still interesting to be called an expert because I'm figuring this stuff out every day myself but uh exank CIO. I've been on both sides of the traditional side and now moving on the digital side entrepreneur and that's me based in New York.

[00:01:47]>> That's awesome. How about you Don?

[00:01:49]>> Hey Tom, thanks again for having us on it. Uh, I'm a brand ambassador, I guess, for money 2020. Scarlet's my boss. Uh, I have a history in the fintech and regg tech space, mainly focused on anti-inancial crime. So, I really got in a chance to get into the weeds of the details of this industry through this book.

[00:02:09]>> Um, well, this is fascinating. I know Donam, you've done a lot in the fraud area, right? You you do a lot of that.

[00:02:15]So near and dear to my heart, forensic accounting and and that uh that realm which I think is part of the issue right with uh digital versus physical currencies. So let's first of all talk about what is DeFi? What what is um decentralized finance?

[00:02:38]>> Sure. I'll I'll take a pass at that because this is something that we get asked a lot. People still don't know what I do for a living. my family and friends. So, we talk about this often.

[00:02:46]I'd say and and again, people use big words, but actually when you break it down, most people can relate to it. So, if you think about TRDFI, let's start there just for there's context. That's traditional finance. Typically, a bank holds your money. They approve your transactions. They set the rules, the fees, and the timelines. But with DeFi, which is known as decentralized finance, as you said earlier, Tom, it's all about digital. Your money instead sits in a digital wallet that you control. And there are there are you know technology essentially that executes the rules and things for you. And the biggest thing which we'll be talking about probably a lot today is speed because that's what's important that your audience knows is how quickly things can happen. You know you hear things about real time. You sit there when you look at your phone and you see things are still pending in your bank account online on your app. That's because things are not actually happening in real time. They take days.

[00:03:35]So that's the the primary difference I'd say. So, so, so decentralized finance is really taking the bank out of it. It It's taking away the middleman.

[00:03:44]>> Yeah, I'd say taking the middleman out.

[00:03:46]But one of the things that's interesting and that we really highlight in the book is about the role that the bank plays and there is still opportunity for the bank to play a a meaningful role especially as we think about the scale etc. But yes, there is taking out the middleman. It's actually putting more control into the end uh users yourself and myself and how technology helps that to happen faster especially when we're thinking about across borders across geographies and things like that.

[00:04:12]>> So so one more bit of context Scarlet how do you um what is the connection between crypto currency and DeFi because they tend to be lumped together. Yeah, great question and I'm sure Donna has some additional thoughts on this one, but so crypto is it's a it's a currency.

[00:04:32]DeFi, decentralized finance is the plumbing. So if you I like to use analogies, this is where my head goes.

[00:04:38]When we think about decentralized finance, that's the plumbing and pipes that it's built to move money and crypto sits on top of that. So they crypto is part of the decentralized finance world and we do some specific talks about crypto, stable coins, etc. But decentralized finance as a concept is really more about the infrastructure and the plumbing underneath that allows these things to happen.

[00:04:57]>> Okay. So, so let me ask follow up on that. So, what you're talking about with DeFi wouldn't necessarily require crypto, right? I mean, it could be still traditional money because most of our money is transacted digitally anyway. I mean, very, you know, very little cash is transacted. In fact, Treasury announced that uh uh they're planning to eliminate cash in 20 by 2027. So, it it's already, you know, it's digital anyway. How important is crypto to the DeFi conversation or could it be done without cryptocurrency?

[00:05:34]>> So, the short answer is decentralized finance can 100% happen without cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency has great applications and use cases of it.

[00:05:42]But I'm sure Don, you spent a lot of time thinking about this one as well.

[00:05:46]Yeah, I'd say crypto is like a it is literally a currency like having the dollar or the pound, right? Whereas DeFi is everything around it. You don't need to have a particular currency to operate a bank, but you still have the bank, right? You still have the payments, you have the accounts, you still have um the custody and the governance rules. All of that is true for DeFi as well. It's it's a purely digital approach to finance. So that's how I like to put it.

[00:06:15]>> So So one of the challenges with traditional currency is that you have US currency and then you have Chinese currency and then you have uh the euro and then you have the British pound and you have all these different currencies and you've and they've got to end up back in the country somehow. I mean either either you've got what we call, you know, might call the Euro dollar where you're actually transactioning in dollar terms but the money never comes into the US. um and and that's pretty much specific to to the dollar as I understand it. But um the euro could be done used the same way. But typically what happens is there's this kind of a a balance that balancing that has to happen. Whereas with crypto it's just internationally recognized. So that would be one of the advantages to particularly say a bitcoin that was more secure and fixed. You don't have somebody adding bitcoin all the time, right? You know there there's a max there. There's a cap on that. So, kind of walk through that with us if you would.

[00:07:17]>> So, are you asking specifically about things like inflation and >> No, I I'm I'm talking about just Okay.

[00:07:23]So, so when you're talking about the the DeFi, okay, does crypto make it easier is what I'm asking.

[00:07:32]>> Yeah, I I would say so. I think we've seen a real evolution of crypto now.

[00:07:36]People are talking about stable coins a lot more in traditional finance spaces around how to transact. So you have stable coins which are kind of a type of cryptocurrency although a lot of people wouldn't like to say that. It's it's a more stable and less volatile way of envisioning the money in the system.

[00:07:56]>> Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because this is a big question I've had for a long time. Um explain what a stable coin is and why it's better than an actual dollar. I I mean if a stable coin is tied to the dollar, why why not just use dollars?

[00:08:10]>> Sure. Why counter that is why don't we just use gold, right? Like you you don't pay with a gold coin at the grocery store, right? You pay in dollars. That dollar is a representation of wealth and value. So when you we use stable coins pegged to the dollar for example, it's a more convenient and faster and easier transactable way of having that money represented in the economy.

[00:08:38]>> And why is that? Is that because again is that going back to the fundamentals of DeFi that you don't have to use the bank?

[00:08:44]>> Exactly that. Like sorry >> go ahead. Go Donna.

[00:08:48]>> Uh pretty much exactly that, right? So you have these stable coins which are able to move so much faster. They're traveling on digital rails. So, you're not having to remediate, sorry, I'm getting a little bit technical here.

[00:09:00]You're not having >> you're not having to remediate these things on ledgers internally at the bank. You're just moving your money quickly. Like a lot of banks, say you're transacting from the US to Canada, let's say. When you move your money from the US to Canada, you might have to use like a Western Union or a Moneygram or any sort of crossber transaction facility.

[00:09:22]The way they do that is they have an account in a bank local to Canada. They have a bank in the US and that bank in Canada is denominated in, you know, the Canadian dollar. They have to hold all that money there, which is money that isn't being used. They're not spending that money. It's money that's there purely to to, I guess, essentially transact your money from the US to Canada. So, if you were to have stable coins instead, you'd free up all that cash because you don't have to have money sitting in an account waiting to be deployed. Instead, you're sending the money directly from one country to another and it moves instantly.

[00:10:01]>> Okay. So can I add can I add to that Tom because I think it's it's a really it's a good question and it's one that I think just if we get as simple as possible to your to Donna's point about the gold to your point about moving money across borders really in the most simple way a stable coin is a digital version of a dollar that it moves like crypto back to the fast thing but it holds the value like cash so as Dam said it's money on the internet it's pegged one to one to something stable which has historically been the US dollar and it's designed not a swing in price. So if you think all the headlines that you all see like Bitcoin at all-time high 120 all a sudden it's down to its low at 60 it's there's a lot of fluctuation there whereas the dollar is much more stable.

[00:10:43]So but the key difference between cash dollar that you said and the stable coin is around how fast cheap and and again it's like 247 which is not just about fast but it's going all the time. So, if you think about it just to the coin cash thing, Bitcoin is kind of more like the digital gold whereas stable coins are like the digital cash. So, they're related and they're similar, but they're quite different.

[00:11:06]>> That that that's a good example. But if if you've got a stable coin and and it's it's pegged to the dollar, does it also have to have dollars in reserve so that you can actually exchange it for a dollar?

[00:11:22]So for example, for example, if I've got a if take a gold ETF, okay, so a gold ETF, they have to have the gold, you know, the ETF is just the form of trading the gold so they don't have to move physical gold. That's the whole point of the ETF, right? Is that the same with stable coins that they actually have to have the dollars on hand? So you got to have a pretty big supply of dollars. So it would seem like the logical thing to do is what the US is talking about is actually doing its own stable coin, basically a digital dollar.

[00:11:54]>> Yes. So you're talking about liquidity reserves in these businesses, right? So that's that's what they need to have and yeah, that's what a lot of the regulations coming in. So Micah in the uh EU and uh the Genius Act and Clarity Act, although I think the Clarity Act is still a bill in the US. That's what those sorts of things are trying to build and provision for to a degree. The stable coin that you're talking about from like the US version where it would be treasurybacked, that's more of a um central bank digital currency. So that's essentially translating all of the currency into a digital format. So far I don't know how much has been done on that side from the US. like the Trump administration has been a very big supporter of supporting um private enterprise to create uh digital uh versions of the dollar. If they go down this the CBDC route, that's one way of doing things to support that that work.

[00:12:50]>> So would that allow for this for the DeFi? Would it allow for it to move quickly or do you still have you know just because digital doesn't mean necessarily don't need banks. Would would it would it allow them I mean and and let's also talk about how important the banks are because the banks are have are a big lobby right they have a lot of power not just in the US but around the world the big central the central banks have an enormous amount of power so how how is that really going to function the banks don't want to become irrelevant so you talk in your book about bringing these two together is that where they come together because you're still going to have the banks and if you do why do you need the digital currency Yeah, the banks are never going to become irrelevant, right? Like they're they're the arbiters of money globally.

[00:13:37]So that's one thing that we have seen in the industry and we talk about in the book quite a bit is that Tradfi and DeFi are literally converging. They're intersecting. They're working together because on the one hand you have the DeFi players, the the decentralized finance players who are, you know, really working creating digital plumbing like Scarlet said and working in the digital currency space. But then you also have the traditional financial institutions like the big banks, the central banks, uh you know, all all the big bank names that you know, right?

[00:14:08]They're also very uh they're experts at understanding money movement and how to work across borders and work across different industries and sectors and really fund those areas. They're vital because they're already in all these spaces delivering the money.

[00:14:27]So is is the is is really the point of this to reduce friction.

[00:14:32]>> Yeah, that's definitely both.

[00:14:34]>> Yeah, it's both. And Donna, you can you can elaborate on that. Yes, it's about reducing and it depends on whose angle you're looking at it from. And so even to the point of moving money across borders, if you were living in Argentina, one day your currency would be worth X, you can wake up tomorrow and all a sudden that that value has completely gone away. Where you could buy one banana for your money and now you can buy zero. you can buy a hundred. So really it's about stability.

[00:14:59]But yes, I think the important thing here if you kind of take a step back and think about what's happening, it is around the role that technology is playing to make people move money easier and faster but also have better control of their money. So things like you know us sitting in the US, Chime was a fintech, it's a neo bank, it's a digital bank that came, it just went public and they're groundbreaking. They did a lot of great marketing and there there's that's a great team. My point of bringing them up is one of the revolutionary things they did was they allowed people to get money two days before their paycheck. So a lot of people in in our country and around the world are still living paycheck to paycheck. So the ability to have money in real time, not wait over a weekend, not wait um not be able to trade if you see a great trade all of a sudden in the past uh you know on the exchanges that time closed you couldn't trade anymore.

[00:15:48]So it's actually about it is about friction. It is about convenience but it's also about speed which hopefully is about you know wealth creation wealth generation you know creating general generational wealth etc. And that's something that we talk a lot about in the book is the real impact is on is on everyday people and how they can um have better control over their finances as well.

[00:16:09]>> Okay. So let's talk about some of the underlying technology blockchain. One of the challenges how how let's start with blockchain. Is DeFi dependent on blockchain? Is it is it using blockchain to do this or is is DeFi a broader term than that?

[00:16:26]>> I would say that blockchain is kind of fundamental to the DeFi environment.

[00:16:31]There are elements of DeFi that don't rely on blockchain technology as such, but we're always working on a network.

[00:16:37]We're always working on a uh a layer 1 or a layer. Sorry, again, I'm getting too technical. uh you're always working on a blockchainbased system to deliver those services because that's it's one way of thinking is like blockchain is the roads that the money is moving through.

[00:16:56]>> Okay. So, so one of the challenges historically with blockchain in in my my view what the reason it's been so slow, it's actually to me I I thought it was going to be adopted really a lot more quickly is it's a little clunky because you don't have there's the advantage of centralized is you have one player, right? You got a Visa, you got Visa and they handle everything. So it's it's centralized is by definition is is fast whereas decentralized where everybody is every every transaction is auditing every transaction which kind of the definition of blockchain is really clunky. What's what's making it faster?

[00:17:35]What's I mean you're because you're talking about this is a way to speed things up and yet everything I've heard about blockchain is wow the problem is it slows it down.

[00:17:44]>> Well so there's there's a myriad of things to get into there. So I'd say first and foremost it another buzzword that you're going to hear a lot about is interoperability. So how quickly systems move together because to your point earlier on the bank piece. So this was back to my banking days. We were going to create a internal basically blockchain amongst the banks where the banks still had control right where and there's many different consortiums who are focusing on that where it makes it very easy for Tom at US Bank and Scarlet at BBVA to move money across each other because BBVA and US Bank in this example are part of the same closed dooror network.

[00:18:22]Then you have the open the open side as well which is where all of these how we started the conversation the crypto etc. they're on the open rails for everyone.

[00:18:30]So what is being worked on now is the interoperability between these two because to your point and to Dunham's road analogy, some highways are going this way, some bridges are over here.

[00:18:39]Unless they're connecting to your original question around the speed, it's not going to fully be there. But and and now there's an entire category of companies who are building that connective tissue to make the speed faster because they people were all bu building on their their own and then they weren't necessarily talking. So now there's a whole group of fintech companies who are connecting all of these different rails or roads for lack of a better word to make it faster. From what I was seeing back in the day too, it it was less speed. It was more about scale and that was always the thing is we're not we're talking, you know, if you think about you use the Visa, the amount of transactions that move through Visa in any given one time versus what's happening now. It's here to here. So the way that you get adoption is by doing that. Now, the one thing I'd say, and I don't this is a whole other conversation, but some of this is is based off of regulation and what the respective regulators around the world.

[00:19:31]And to your point earlier, the US regulator is not the Asia is not the Thailand regulator. So, you deal with some issues there with movement of money.

[00:19:39]>> Um, but yeah, we're we're getting closer there. And as regulation starts evolving, they're they're actually requiring a bit more of this interoperability, which makes it easier for us to scale. And Don gave the example of Western Union, probably one of the ones that we know the best in terms of the movement of money. They have adopted this technology and any day now they're going to act they announced that they were going to do their own stable coin to your point of, you know, independent one doing their own stable coin. They actually launched that at our show in October. It still hasn't started yet, but they're doing it this year in 2026.

[00:20:10]>> This is um fascinating stuff. So how how important I mean this has got to take an enormous amount of computing power. I mean just an enormous amount. I mean we talk about how much computing power the AI takes and we're building all these data centers. How important is that that the availability of that computing power and that the and the generation of new computing technology so that it does get faster because it does seem like DeFi handles really has to handle more than centralized finance.

[00:20:46]I think when it comes to compute a lot of what people talk about with compute when it comes to cryptocurrencies around the mining sector like bitcoin mining whereas when it comes to transacting yeah we we need compute and we need data centers to build that stuff I think from what I understand I think it's nowhere near as much as what AI is demanding from >> place can I just give you one example because as you were saying that Tom it just came into my mind so we were talking about banks were talking about slowness and then the role of regulation I brought up at the end. So if you think about outside of the Chinese banks, the largest bank in the world is what JP Morgan. They are already they're the largest US bank. They're already moving money and real money on blockchain every day. So they had been building forever now. It used to be called Onyx. It's now called Kinesis. That's their live blockchain payments platform. And regardless of the highs and lows of the the crypto world, they were still building that. They use JPM coin and they process billions daily of institutional payments and settlements on this on this uh this uh platform. And to your point earlier, some of this is with them and they're also using Coinbase's base network. So there is back to the original point of the book with this convergence, they're doing their own stuff, but they also need these technologies and these fintech providers to connect with to do it better and at scale. So they're they're already actively settling on those public blockchains via Coinbase. So, that's a real example of what they're doing by themselves, what they've created with another provider, uh, which a lot of people would know Coinbase if they're doing anything in the in the crypto world, let's say.

[00:22:22]>> So, so so, so practically speaking, let's let's go practical for the next few minutes. How does this affect the average person, the average business owner, the uh, who's who's uh, transacting business? Are they now going to start transacting business as something other than dollars or is this going to be they're going to transact in dollars and the bank's going to do it like you're talking about with JP Morgan? They're going to do it um using uh DeFi.

[00:22:48]It's possible that a lot of your listeners are already transacting using stable coins without even realizing it.

[00:22:54]A lot of payments companies in Europe at least are already using stable coins and crypto to settle payments in the background. It's one of many options that's often happening when that what that translates to for the everyday person is not waiting like like Scarlet said, you know, not waiting around to know whether or not your uh transaction is cleared. One of the things that drives me insane, I I love my personal finance. One of the things that drives me insane is when I look on my MX and it says pending, you know, like I'm just like, "Oh no, I want that to be there so I can so I can know how much money I need to take to clear it." Well, I have the same issue. You know, you you you send a wire and it says, "Well, it's going to be there in three businesses."

[00:23:35]I'm going, "What?

[00:23:37]>> How is it not there in three seconds?"

[00:23:39]>> Yeah.

[00:23:40]>> Exactly. And that's completely possible with stable coins. Like, we're going to move to a world where we have instant payments through something called atomic settlement. So, that's T plus Z. That's instant payment. That will change everything for everyone. But ideally, it's going to become something that you don't even notice. In the same way that when I sit down at the end of the day and I put on Netflix, I don't wait 10 minutes for it to load up a show, right?

[00:24:06]Happens. 10 years ago, that wasn't well maybe 15 years ago, that wasn't really a thing.

[00:24:12]It'll become blended into the natural way of their lives.

[00:24:16]>> Interesting.

[00:24:18]All right. So, what are what do you see as the issues? What are what are the challenges here? What are the challenges business owners are going to face? What what are the challenges investors are going to face?

[00:24:30]>> Yeah, it's it's a good question. Maybe Donna can come in on the second part, but the challenges cover a myriad of things. And we've actually even as part of this conversation, we're surfacing some of the challenges. Well, the world is getting more and more global in many ways. yet if let's say the Clarity Act passes which I think your audience would probably know a little bit about that because it's all over the news um right now uh which is part two from the Genius Act which is all around rewards etc. Anyways the reason why I bring that up is that's great for the US but if all of a sudden to Donna's point Micah which is a lot of the regulation that's happening in Europe says we're not doing this then it's still hard for Tom to go send money to his family in Sweden or whatever else. So part of it is there needs to be more consensus from a regulatory perspective around the world on what what we're doing. And then I think the other part is, you know, for for the the changing for the day-to-day for the business owners, you know, one thing that's it's about making them have better understanding of their cash flow.

[00:25:29]So that's all good things. And then even on the end day consumers. So I went and just so I'm a Knicks Well, I'm really a Nuggets fan, but I live in New York. So okay, I'm kind of a Knicks fan as well.

[00:25:39]I the game was last night, right? Right.

[00:25:41]>> I got jerseys for my kids. They didn't fit. I had to go return them. They said, "Oh, you'll get this money back in 4 days or whatever." Like, that is insane.

[00:25:48]What do you mean? You have the goods right in front of you. Why is it 4 days?

[00:25:51]Now, I'm not in a position where I needed that money tomorrow. But there are a lot of people who are. So, to Dam's point, like there's really not the same need. Like, they don't have to worry about how it's happening. For them, it's I want money in real time.

[00:26:03]And from a shop owner's perspective, they have a much better understanding of exactly what their cash flow looks like.

[00:26:08]But Donna, I think you have some perspective on this as well.

[00:26:12]>> Yeah, I think there's there's three like big challenges that's happening at the moment. There's regulators, which Scarlet covered quite well, and then there's financial institutions, and then you got consumers as well. Like with the financial institutions, they they want to make money, which is a good thing.

[00:26:26]That's what they're there for. But they need to be able to deploy these things at scale. They need they don't need something that works in two or three countries. They need something that works in 150 countries, right? So building that out, the time it takes to build out that level of infrastructure and they're working with the DeFi companies to do that, but it's still going to take time. So time is a huge challenge. Um, I will add though that I think on both those points, people are underestimating how much in a better position DeFi is compared to regular fiat currency. like we have so much uh disharmony across different like monetary regions for regular currency as it is. Crypto is in a much better place in comparison. Blockchain is a much better place. And the the third thing is consumers. Consumers are always going to be the tricky one because they're the biggest most important group ever.

[00:27:22]>> They're the biggest user.

[00:27:23]>> Exactly. They're the biggest user, but they're also not a monolith. Right. And it's hard for people to figure out what they want, let alone for business to figure out what they want. So >> yeah, they're already decentralized.

[00:27:34]>> Exactly. Exactly. And so so that's that's a huge point, right? Like they're already centralized everywhere and what they want is all different, but what they if you have to zoom out far enough, what they want is the same thing we've been talking about. They want their money, they want their services to work better, faster, and more easily. and achieving that while dealing with the other problems from the regulators and from infrastructure. That's the real challenge.

[00:27:57]>> So let's finish up with this. One of the one of the things I think people are probably most concerned about is fraud.

[00:28:04]Okay. And Dunham, I know this is your specialty, but you have Sam Bangman Freid in the crypto world, massive fraud. Okay. We we we we we we recently had uh you know we have attacks on uh wallets constantly like Coinbase and and others. Okay. What's going to prevent that fraud? Because when you start moving money that fast, it can disappear just as fast, too. One of the advantages to being slow is, hey, wait, pause. I can un undo this. I can't do that if it's instant.

[00:28:37]I actually disagree that that's an advantage of being slow because if the money goes or the money moves, you can't necessarily unwind it back straight away, right? Like that doesn't always happen because people can move on that money or they might cash it out into cash and then it you've lost complete track of it. We have an entire chapter dedicated to fraud in the book. Uh and I I always say there are no silver bullets. There's no magic bullet for dealing with frauds. But actually blockchain technology really helps combat fraud. Fraud at the moment is around a5 trillion dollar problem globally. That's around the size of Germany's GDP. So fraud is a country.

[00:29:15]Like that's what you're trying to tackle at this scale. And if you if you have to deal with that sort of money, one one thing that you can do is if everyone's money is on the digital wallets, you can start labeling everything with digital identity as well on those digital wallets. So you could potentially track money like if at the moment if I give you a penny, you have no idea where it came from, right? But if I gave you a bit of a stable coin and with the right digital identity uh processes in place, theoretically you could track that back all the way to the place it was first mined from, right? Or the first issued from, right?

[00:29:55]>> There like we have this in the book.

[00:29:57]There are stories of people who lost their life savings who had it re uh like uh reiven to them 5 years later all of the money plus interest because I think it was the FBI was able to track down every single element of their money that had been split into various parts of bitcoins and sent all across the world.

[00:30:17]Now let's talk about the dark side of that. Um, which I think pe a lot of people are concerned about with a digital let's just say digital currency is okay now but now the government can track how I use my money. Now is the government going to say hey if you if you donated to this cause you're on a watch list. Okay we're not going to let you you're on a no-fly list because you did this with your money because they can track that. How do you combat that?

[00:30:45]because frankly I think that's one of the biggest issues.

[00:30:49]>> Yeah, it's it's a huge issue and I I fully agree. I don't want the government seeing everything that I'm spending my money on. I doubt anyone else does. But there's a thing called zero knowledge proofs which we also go into the book ZKPs. There are ways of proving out information to people like like I'm over 18 but no one needs to know how old I am, right? There are ways of proving that mathematically, cryptographically to merchants, to providers without giving up any of my private information, right? Like if I'm gonna go buy a, you know, a bottle of vodka, let's say, or a beer. It's too early for vodka. Uh then no one needs to know how old I am. They just need to know that I'm over 80, over 21. Uh so that uh they can sell me the bottle, right? They don't need to know how old I am. we that there's absolute potential and uh real solutions to make it so that you can prove out date of birth or age or location or provenence without ever having to give up the actual private information.

[00:31:49]>> Yeah, I get that. But that the concern is that the government has that information and they have the ability to go in. You know, I'm not concern I'm not concerned about the store knowing how old I am. Okay, they can look at me.

[00:32:00]They got a pretty good idea, right?

[00:32:02]Yeah, >> I'm a little I'm a lot more concerned about the government tracking me.

[00:32:07]>> Yeah, >> one of the great things about digital currency and digital money and digital wallets is you have custody. You own your wallet. No one else can necessarily >> like everybody's their own bank in a way >> essentially. Yeah. you instead instead of becoming someone who uses an exchange as a bank or uses a bank, you'll become someone who has custody of their account, but you own that account and you own who gets access to that account and you can take it wherever you want.

[00:32:34]So, say you want to stop transacting with one exchange or one bank because you don't like something about them.

[00:32:40]Fine, you unlink your your wallet, you take your keys and you move it to a different exchange. I can see that huge benefit. All right, so let's wrap up with this. Um, each of you, uh, if you would give our listeners two or three things they ought to be doing in the in in the next six months, um, when it comes to uh, just finance given this convergence of traditional and uh, DeFi.

[00:33:12]>> It's a great question. So I think a few things is stay informed. uh it can be overwhelming. I think that's one of the reasons why your pod is such a a helpful place because there's a lot going on.

[00:33:21]There's a lot of buzzwords, but also the other thing which I'm so happy we almost got through an entire podcast. I didn't use the word AI, but like there's a lot that that can help you where you can get things custom created uh in the messaging that you understand, but being fully aware of what's happening, why it's happening, and then how you can take advantage. depends on where you are in the spectrum, where you live in the world. But I'd say my number one thing is stay up todate and it's not as intimidating as it sounds when you see all these big buzzwords. If you actually just look at the bottom layer, it's really just new digital technology that makes it easier to move money. It's obviously a lot more complex than that.

[00:33:56]But it it is relatable to anyone if you actually dive into it. So the more that you can stay up to date, there's a lot of opportunities to take advantage.

[00:34:04]>> And Donna, what about you?

[00:34:05]>> I'd echo I'd echo that. I think the principles of money stay the same.

[00:34:09]They've been the same for thousands of years and they probably will be for thousands more. What technology does is it unlocks opportunity. So looking at what you Yeah, like like S said, read more, say stay informed and also take a critical eye to things, right? If something doesn't make sense to you, then you probably shouldn't get too excited about it until it does. So read more and more and more as much as you can. That is what I would say to everyone.

[00:34:34]>> Awesome. So, we've been uh here on the wealthy show with Scarlett Sber and Donam Nurse Sigadoo, and their book is The New Intersection of Money. Uh available for pre-order now or order um right now. So, come out. You want to learn more about this, get there. When we get a better understanding of finance, um, both global finance and macro, as well as, uh, how it applies to us micro, we're always going to make way more money and pay way with less tax.

[00:35:04]We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Wealthability Show. If today's episode gave you a new perspective, remember this, the tax law is not your enemy. It's a road map. And when you know how to follow it, you can build real lasting wealth. If you're a business owner or investor who's tired of overpaying taxes, the Wealthability Accelerator is your next step, you'll have the opportunity to work directly with me for 80% less than my standard rate, and I'll personally guide you through how to change your facts so that you can change your tax. Go to wealthability.com/bonus and apply today. Remember, it's not just what you make, it's what you keep.

[00:35:52]This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Network.