A Golden Visa for Buying Bitcoin

Now who’s laughing?

A couple years ago, the world snickered at El Salvador going all-in on bitcoin. The granddaddy of crypto is legal tender in the Central American country. El Salvador’s bitcoin portfolio, which the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and others mocked and wrung their hands over is up some $84 million.

And (germane to this dispatch) El Salvador was the first country to offer what is effectively “citizenship by bitcoin”—in which a donation of $1 million worth of bitcoin to the country will land you citizenship and a local passport. (Which actually isn’t a bad passport, relatively speaking… it grants visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 136 countries.)

Of course, the world isn’t beating down the door to send a million dollars to a country that, until recently, was best known for gangland warfare and a civil war back in the 80s and early 90s.

But…

Now it appears a more solid country is following in El Salvador’s footsteps… sort of.

And it’s a European country.

A well-known European country where nearly everyone seems to be flocking these days…

Portugal.

A new investment fund, the Unbound Fund, has announced a new take on Portugal’s so-called Golden Visa, a residence-by-investment program that can ultimately lead to citizenship in as little as five years.

The cost: Half that of El Salvador—just $500,000. And it’s not a donation. It’s an investment… in bitcoin.

I’m not gonna go through all the details of the opportunity because ultimately this dispatch isn’t about residency and citizenship.

It’s about bitcoin and its growing adoption globally…

Indeed, a story in my inbox over the weekend raised an intriguing point: BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s involvement in bitcoin ETFs (among other Wall Street giants) suggests growing long-term confidence in the asset’s value.

Lots of the world still questions bitcoin’s authenticity because they don’t understand the tech and, thus, don’t trust it.

You gotta wonder how many people trusted electricity in its earliest days. Or how many trusted those fancy cars driving too fast on cobblestone city streets made for horses and buggies? How many people trusted the internet early on?

How many thought a phone in your pocket was a stupid idea? How many said Amazon’s business model of letting people order books online was ignorant, when consumers could just mosey on down to the Book Nook and be home inside of an hour?

Every technology ever invented, starting with fire, has taken time to catch on. Anything that displaces what people are comfortable with, is reflexively viewed with suspicion…

I’ve been in crypto since 2017. I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly, the devastating—and the generational-wealth-creation that has rolled through crypto.

More importantly… I’ve seen a sea change in mindset.

There wasn’t a single government that cared about crypto early on. And then, when governments did care about crypto, it was because they were worried about scams, tax evasion… crime of all sorts. We must kill the baby and toss out the poisoned bath water!

Today, that view is largely held by older Boomer politicians and global bureaucrats with turf—and income sources—to protect.

The enlightened politicians and bureaucrats realize the sea change is at hand. A tsunami, really. They recognize that Boomers, sadly, are rapidly losing political heft. They realize that Gen X largely doesn’t care, which has always been the default Gen X stance on pretty much everything (note: I’m Gen X).

And they realize that the millennials and Gen Z—the largest combined voting block in US history—both care a great deal about what crypto represents: financial freedom, financial equality, and financial opportunity that doesn’t care about skin color or sexual orientation or whatever… (That’s because in the decentralized world of crypto, financial power is no longer solely in the hands of big banks and financiers.)

So it is, then, that we are seeing governments, politicians, companies, and ginormous financial institutions increasingly champion crypto.

And we see them increasingly concede what I have been saying for seven years now… Crypto is the future.

Apple, in fact, just this month announced that it’s opening the coding for the iPhone wallet to third-party app developers who are already working on tying a crypto wallet to the phone’s internal chip that allows for tap-n-go payments. Meaning that we’re going to see a vast number of stores increasingly accept crypto like Solana and others for Big Gulps and Happy Meals. (My bet: We see that begin to arrive early next year.)

Here’s the bigger point about Portugal and residency-by-crypto…

There are those who will slough off this news. They will hear the naysayers do their naysaying and they will believe it, because it’s a mainstream media narrative.

And then there are those who are in the trenches, like me and you, who understand why and how crypto is changing the world around us.

Those who invest in bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and many other smaller cryptocurrencies… they’re the ones who will survive the dollar’s never-ending erosion of purchasing power… and the very real likelihood of a dollar/debt crisis later this decade…

We’re the ones who have a shot at generational crypto wealth—thanks to cryptos with moonshot potential like those I cover in my Crypto Profits Workshop.

I’m not telling you that you need to read up on chasing residency in Portugal by investing in bitcoin. That’s not really the point here.

But the news from Portugal is reason #784 why you need to learn about crypto and why you need to own crypto…

It’s the future.

The savvy will ride that wave into the future and profit from it more than I dare tell you.