Getty Image / Denise Truscello
Dan Bilzerian is one of those figures that seem to live more in a day than most people do in a year.
He is always on the move, playing in the highest-stakes poker game, and partying on the biggest yachts with the most gorgeous women. Bilzerian’s everywhere.
This week he was in the front yard of his ‘estate’ recording a podcast interview with Steve-O. They talked about Dan winning a fortune playing poker, his attachment to ‘Molly’s Game’, watching people lose it all at the table, and more.
At one point in the interview, Dan Bilzerian talks about how he had to get paid in crypto and was pissed about paying the 5% fee for bitcoin only to make a literal fortune off it. This is because Dan received some advice from a friend in finance.
The discussion starts around the 37-minute mark:
How Dan Bilzerian Made A Fortune Off Bitcoin
Dan says they ‘banned white guys from Macao’, claiming ‘these white guys were going over there’ and taking huge money off locals guys at the poker tables. Bilzerian claims this led to some sort of banning at the poker tables.
Dan says they found an American pro who was Asian but spoke Mandarin. They ‘staked him’, meaning they put up the money this poker player was using at the tables.
That guy then went to Macao and made ‘millions of dollars’ but the only way that person could pay Bilzerian and co. back is by Bitcoin. Dan Bilzerian says he was pissed about this initially because he had to pay a 5% transaction fee. Describing it at the time as ‘ahh, that’s f–king bull–it. I don’t want to pay 5%…’
He points out that 5% on a million dollars is $50,000 and that’s not an insignificant amount of money. The other option was this poker player they were staking could try and come back with ‘duffel bags’ full of Chinese cash to exchange back in the United States.
Dan Bilzerians says he eventually accepted the 5% transaction fee for Bitcoin. He put it on a laptop and basically forgot about it for a while.
At this point in time, Bilzerian says BTC was worth only about $300/coin.
Flash forward several years and Dan has a friend telling him how ‘Bitcoin is going off!’ He realized he had some on a laptop in his safe. Of course, he didn’t remember the password to the computer and had to move mountains to unlock the computer and get into his BTC wallet.
Eventually, he did and discovered that he was sitting on a literal fortune. After opening his wallet he says ‘he held it and actually bought ETH’ and other crypto assets and ‘road the wave’ making ‘a lot of money in crypto.’
Steve-O then asks Dan Bilzerian how he got out at the right time, before it all ‘tanked’.
Dan Bilzerian says “I was able to call such good times to cash out. I cashed out at like 1650 and the high was like 19-something.” He added that he “rode it up to the 19 and (his) buddy was like panicking, trying to sell to me.”
Bilzerian told the friend “bro, I got so much f–king Bitcoin. I don’t need any more.” Telling the friend to “just hold onto it.”
The Advice That Made Bilzerian A Fortune
Dan Bilzerian says this friend who was panicking about BTC was a natural gas trader friend of his. He told Dan “if you’re not a buyer at $17,700 (then) you should be a seller.”
Bilzerian says he thought long and hard about that and came to the conclusion that his friend is right. Ultimately deciding that “if you don’t want to buy at a certain price then you should probably be selling. If you think it’s more likely that it’s going to go down than up.”
So Dan sold when it went down to $16,500 and “sold almost all of it.” This is after acquiring untold millions in BTC when BTC was worth just $300/coin.
Bilzerian adds that he cashed out for a “s–tload of money” and then bought back into BTC for some more and road it back up and sold his next batch of coins “at like $58K”, presumably after buying around $16.5K.
So, yeah, “if you’re not a buyer at this price then you should be selling” is the advice that made Dan Bilzerian millions upon millions of dollars in crypto.
Watch the full interview here: