Bitcoin Legacy: Securing Your Block of Generational Wealth

Yahoo News · May 2, 2025

"Bitcoin Legacy: Securing Your Block of Generational Wealth"

Welcome back to Mind Over Money. I'm Kevin Cook, your field guide and storyteller for the fascinating arena of Behavioral Economics.

In this episode, I sat down with a Wall Street veteran who now spends his days helping high-net-worth individuals, families, and business owners to secure their Bitcoin for optimal inheritance planning, loans, and legacy solutions.

Trey Sellers has worked for Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, and MetLife where he specialized in technology consulting and back-office systems. At the investment bank Truist, he worked on the capital markets trading floor running risk analysis and P&L models for multi-asset institutional portfolios.

Trey is now a Vice President of Sales for a company called Unchained.

Unchained offers a suite of financial and custody services designed to, in their words, "protect your bitcoin with cold storage -- that you control." Clients also get access to other services including trading, inheritance planning, loans, and Bitcoin IRAs.

Unchained helps thousands of individuals and businesses by securing nearly $10 billion worth of Bitcoin.

**Bitcoin Security and Scarcity Are For Everyone**

Now if you don't consider yourself HNW, don't worry 'cause I'm not either. Recall that Forbes, in their original definition of "rich" for the "400" list, used to define it as "$10 million net worth and $1 million in annual income." Now I think everyone on the list is a billionaire.

In the conversation with Trey, you are still going to learn a lot about the Bitcoin investment frontier that will apply to you as you build your own family legacy and inheritance plans. You should take away key questions that you can ask your financial advisors about Bitcoin and your own "family office."

Trey helps us navigate terminology like "on-chain," self-custody, and cold storage. And he lays out the importance of knowing how you own and secure your Bitcoin, whether you bought some in a Coinbase COIN or Robinhood HOOD account, or you’re using a hardware wallet and private keys.

**Your Own Personal Fort Knox**

There were three highlights in my conversation with Trey that I want to preview. First, was how he seized the moment at Truist to teach the staff at all levels about what he thought was coming with Bitcoin after the "halving" in 2020. He built a slide deck he titled "Bitcoin for Bankers" which made its way throughout the organization and made him an authority as interest grew during the rally to $69,000 in 2021.

Second, as he was explaining the services of Unchained and how they openly work with your financial advisors -- legal, tax, planning, estate -- to create sound structures and procedures, he said it’s like building your own “personal Fort Knox.”

The third highlight with Trey is how he has adapted the FIRE concept of "Financial Independence, Retire Early" to the ultimate freedom asset.

**Millions of Stories, Only 21 Million Bitcoin**

Since I've been in financial markets for three decades, I tend to notice a big divide between the "youngsters" who grew up with Bitcoin just like smartphones, and the traditional finance or "tradfi" folks (like me) who studied the new asset class for years and one day finally realized the true power of Bitcoin (btw, I still capitalize the "B" just like the Internet as a unique technology protocol).

The first group tends to be tech-savvy and skeptical about old institutions, while my group can be full of late-adopters who understand the fiat monetary system that got us to the day where we said "Wow, this digital gold is really an entirely new and compelling asset class that can compete with barbarous gold and money printing!"

Trey Sellers is a bridge in the middle of these two broad groups. You can follow him on X @ts_hodl for excellent education and wry wit to understand why.

Even Michael Saylor, the current champion of "hodling" (buying, "holding on for dear life" and never selling) didn't "get Bitcoin" until 2020.

**From Fed Apologizer to Fiat Antagonist**

In 2017, I learned a "little bit" about Bitcoin and Blockchain. Like "a little enough" to be dangerous. I thought it could be a big force of change in finance and technology, but I didn't really understand how.

I even did a podcast episode titled "CRISPR or Bitcoin: Which is the Bigger Disruptor?"

Turns out neither were working for me, so I just stuck with the one area I did understand and had high conviction about: the NVIDIA AI revolution.

But I was still watching Bitcoin. Like "on the edge of my seat" during the 2022 bear market when it looked like Michael Saylor's Bitcoin strategy was about to implode his company MicroStrategy... because his "digital real estate" was about to go below his average buy price near $15,000.

He had just bought new highs above $60,000 in 2021. And then he lived under constant media and Wall Street scrutiny as prices collapsed again.

The last thing he needed was a numbskull by the name of Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) creating yet another scandal in the wild west of crypto. As I've written about since my first article on "rogue traders" in 2008 -- before we even heard Bernie Madoff's name -- technology and regulations may evolve, but human nature never does.

But what kept me on the sidelines, or "on the orange fence" to turn a phrase, was that I still couldn't answer two important questions:

(1) How does Bitcoin keep getting hacked, stolen, and lost?

(2) How do I know the supply cap of 21 million is real and permanent?

**The Problem with Fiat Was Still Invisible To Me**

But even as recently as early 2024, I was still on the "orange fence." Then I listened to an event where Saylor was on stage with Peter Diamandis and a Strategy MSTR investor in the audience essentially asked him, "I have made so much money on your stock, why should I buy Bitcoin?"

The next few minutes were a masterclass for me. Here was a guy who spoke my language of markets, derivatives, and economics with the knowledge and conviction that only an MIT engineer could.

Saylor explained how he could offer convertible bonds to investors and arbitrageurs that created a packaged, lower-risk form of Bitcoin volatility for them. He was essentially siphoning-off capital from Wall Street to build his revolution -- that he now teaches other corporations.

I went on to watch more of his interviews and presentations about his 2020 "conversion" moment.

Saylor admits he was acting out of desperation during the pandemic when his company was barely growing and he might only have a 2-3 years of cash runway. But when he studied "the problem" of run-away inflation from deficit-driven fiat printing, it became crystal clear that a digital, secure, finite-supply asset was "the solution."

You couldn't run and you couldn't hide from dollar debasement. And I already agreed with him that a precious relic like gold couldn't be the only way.

This was a turning point in my Bitcoin education. I trusted Saylor's knowledge, his conviction, and his long-term plan. So I hit the books to learn all I could about monetary history and fiat debasement. And to get my two burning questions answered about security and scarcity.

I had always taught investors that we could easily beat price inflation with stocks and real estate. Now I suddenly saw the "hidden inflation" of excessive money printing -- driven by endless fiscal deficits. And then I saw what it could do to silently degrade any investment portfolio with another 5-10% of annual monetary inflation.

**My "Gradually, Then Suddenly" Moment**

In the podcast, Trey Sellers and I talk about the work of Parker Lewis who wrote the 2023 book Gradually, Then Suddenly: A Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money to explain the inevitable Bitcoin monetary revolution. We discuss the view that you should be skeptical as you do "the work" of understanding Bitcoin. And there are no dumb questions. Is it a commodity? Is it money? Is it a better store of value than gold? Who controls it? Can it be outlawed? These are all smart and essential questions that you must pursue to their ends.

Once I "got Bitcoin" I started a small education group for friends and family and began recommending to investors to at least get started with the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF IBIT. Once they had some skin in the game, I knew their interest and learning curve would accelerate like mine did.

And in October, I published an article that basically said, "Get ready to go all-in because Bitcoin is about to breakout above $70k and it will go very quickly to $85K and then $100k." That prediction worked and my followers and I made some dough using call option strategies.

Then things got tricky as Bitcoin stalled again below $100k. But my conviction remains that Bitcoin can hit $500k in 5 years by 2030.

**Bitcoin For Family Offices in 500 Seconds**

To wrap this up, I encourage everyone to watch the video linked above.

My goal was to encourage busy HNW individuals to give just a few minutes to understand why their assets were not entirely safe in the dollar system of stocks, bonds, real estate, and private equity.

Where to Learn More about Bitcoin and Unchained

If you go to the Unchained website, you'll find educational resources and a link to their YouTube channel with lots of good discussion and tutorials.

**Talk soon,**

**Cooker**

This article has been published in [zacks.com] via Yahoo News