The first time Crosby Ralston heard of Bitcoin in 2017, he thought it was just a scam.
“That’s the way it starts out for everyone,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “You think it’s a scam. You think it’s not going to work. And then you lose just about every argument you could ever bring up. And then that’s when it hits you. This is the real deal.”
Ralston has owned a little bitcoin for the past three years now and likes how it has protected the value of his money, by more than keeping pace with inflation.
In fact, he’s so convinced by the benefits he’s seen, he’s become instrumental in convincing colleagues at the Wyoming Highway Patrol Association that they should add it to the group’s investment portfolio.
They’ve been told they’re among the first, if not the first, law enforcement organization in the nation to do that.
“Crosby brought it to our attention,” Wyoming Highway Patrol Association Vice President Austin Bluemel told Cowboy State Daily. “And then as we delved a little bit deeper, we’ve got Senator (Cynthia) Lummis who is pushing on the federal level to do a Bitcoin reserve. And there are a lot of other states across the country looking to start doing things with Bitcoin.”
The move into the mainstream was one data point. Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in value was another. Just in the last five years, bitcoin has gone from $8,900 in the first month of January 2020 to now almost $100,000, which is better than a 1,000% increase.
“We’re not expecting that this is going to make us rich in the next year or two years or even five years,” Bluemel said. “What we are expecting is that this has the potential to help our membership 20, 30 years down the road.”
Inflation Fighter
Ralston’s primary interest in bitcoin has been the currency’s meteoric rise in value over the past five years.
“I’ve grown up in the generation that sits there and says, ‘Man, I gotta save up $500,000 for a house,” he said. “But, grandpappy bought his house at $50,000 and he was making $25,000. He’s making 50% of what his house cost.”
But wages haven’t kept pace with housing inflation, Ralston said.
“We’re making X amount, and it’s nowhere near even 30% of what houses cost,” he said. “So the way I personally am looking at Bitcoin, — and I tell a lot of people, this generation, my generation, younger generations, are looking at Bitcoin as like real estate was to our grandparents. If you’re getting in at under $100,000, $500,000, a million, you’re going to see a lot of growth and a lot of success.”
The growth in bitcoin right now beats anything else Ralston has access to.
“Some of those high-yield savings accounts are pretty spectacular right now,” Ralston said. “They’re 4%, almost 5%. But inflation last month was 3%, and I feel like, me personally, not speaking for my organization, that inflation was a little bit higher than that.”
Regardless of where inflation really is, Ralston said, the undeniable thing to him is that those who had some of their money saved in bitcoin beat inflation by an astounding amount. An amount that right now can’t be equalled by any other investment vehicle that regular people have access to.
Volatility Scares Most Financial Advisors Off
Financial advice about cryptocurrency has so far been all over the map — kind of like bitcoin’s own ups and downs—but a lot of fairly prominent investors have publicly advised against owning it.
Financial guru Dave Ramsey, for example, has mocked cryptocurrency investments as comparable to investing in the Iraqi dinar, while famous investor Warren Buffet has called it a “gambling token” that has no intrinsic value.
A CoinShares survey in February of this year found that 62% of financial advisors believe advising a speculative asset like bitcoin would not align with their legal obligation to act in their client’s best interest, while more than half of the 250 advisors surveyed worried that recommending digital assets would have a negative impact on reputation and relationships with colleagues.
Among the biggest concerns for those recommending against it has been the asset’s volatility.
But with the installation of a new federal administration that is friendlier to these types of assets, as well as more corporations looking at it, there’s a sense the asset could become moremainstream. That has moved some financial advisors to change their opinion.
Suze Orman, for example, has gone from recommending against it to characterizing it as a high-risk, high-reward asset that absolutely makes sense in a diversified portfolio.
Among the reasons she has cited for changing her mind is the fact that more corporations are eyeing this asset, and also because there are large numbers of millennials and Gen Z investors who are interested in it.
Collectively people in those two age groups own 70% of all cryptocurrency.
“The younger generations are seriously into it, and they like it, and, you know, as the youth goes, sometimes, so does the economy,” she said in a September 2024 podcast.
However, like most financial advisors, Orman doesn’t advise going “hog wild and putting a whole lot of money in Bitcoin.”
“I would never invest any money in Bitcoin or any of the Bitcoin ETFs with money that I couldn’t afford to lose,” she added.
Focused On The Learning Experience
Bluemel didn’t say how much money Wyoming Highway Patrol Association is investing in bitcoin, just that it was a large enough amount to make for a reasonable investment.
The association’s plan is to hold that investment for a minimum of at least one year, after which it will be evaluated on a regular basis.
Bluemel and Ralston have been checking in on bitcoin’s value since the association bought in and said the asset is down a little over their initial purchase price.
“But if it’s up 2% today or 40% tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter,” Ralston said. “What we’re focused on is 12 months from now, and kind of just getting together with some of the other representatives and seeing, ‘Hey, are you guys starting to learn about this? Are you starting to understand it? And what are we going to do going forward?”
After the year is up, the investment will be evaluated to determine if it should continue, increase, or decrease.
“It’s all about learning,” Bluemel said. “We’ve taken a step out of our comfort zone. We’ve challenged our ideas, we’ve challenged our thinking. And we’re all about trying to learn and continue bettering ourselves that way.”
If the investment fails to pan out, Austin said the investment is small enough to be looked at as simply a learning experience.
“Obviously, we hope the outcome is fantastic,” he said. “But we will learn something either way.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
