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Welcome to Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.

Future Technologies are always to transform our lives for better or worse, are the focus of

this podcast.

Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used, or just around

the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain, virtual

reality, and more.

Hi, this is Richard Jacobs with Future Tech Podcast.

My guest today is Michael Pohl, who runs a couple of investor groups through Facebook.

Mike, how are you doing?

Hey, Rich. I'm good. Thanks. How are you?

Good. Yeah, can you tell listeners, what are the names of the two investment groups that you run and what kind of activities do you do in them? Sure. The sort of pay group, which is for investors, you know, with 10,000 on cryptos. And I've been running that for the last year and that's called the New Money Mastermind. So that's really focused on investors who are looking to really understand how cryptocurrencies work and who have a bit of skin in the game, you know, already been investing for a while and just trying to understand kind of where we're growing because obviously this year has been a lot of growth in the whole crypto space. So that's the paid group and the free group is called Crypto Curious People and that's more for beginners who really just want to understand what cryptos are really sort of basic terminology and stuff just to help people get familiar with the, yeah, with the space. So those are two groups. How many members in each group? In the pay group, there's about 55 people right now, and the free group's got a couple hundred. So the free group actually started very recently because there's so many people just kind of, you know, message me all the time. I thought, okay, let me just make a free group four for people. That's quite new. And yeah, a lot of people jumping in there. I think, you know, the public awareness of cryptocurrency is really taking off this year. So, you know, it doesn't require any marketing. It's just, you know, where the mouth gets around. And yeah, you know, we're focusing on mostly ICOs now. So I think It's also very popular buzzword. People don't really understand how to evaluate that space.

So maybe we can talk about that for a bit for your audience, but I think that's very emerging, you know, that's very emerging, you know, growth area, probably the fastest growth area in cryptos right now, but also a lot of risk obviously. So, yeah, so really key to to know what you're getting into you before you start investing. What are some of the top questions people have in the, you know, in the free group?

What do people, are you surprised at how much people know or how little people know? What kind of things do you have to cover? Yeah, the free group is really mixed. There's people at all different levels. Some people have gone into cryptocurrencies a while ago. They're just kind of sitting on Bitcoin or Ethereum from years ago. And they don't really understand ICOs, so they're still quite new to that space. And obviously, they're seeing there's a lot of growth there. And they're just trying to understand, you know, how do they invest in that space? Because if you look at the space, you know, it's so new and so immature, there's a lot of ICOs coming out, maybe dozens every week now and obviously obviously maybe 80, 90% of them, I would say, are scams, or at least, you know, are not really going to be around in a couple years. So I think, you know, people are obviously reluctant. Whenever, whenever you don't understand something, you perceive it as risky, and that's kind of how cryptocurrencies was for a while, you know, whenever everyone thought it wasn't, you know, going to be around for ages.

And then obviously, as we start to understand a bit, we realize where the long-term growth is and the upside is. But now even, you know, people who have been in Bitcoin Ethereum for years, they see ICOs as risky just because they don't understand it. So I think, you know, even though people have experience in the space, it's still very new to ICOs. and obviously we've got security tokens and the whole asset tokenization wave

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