“A retired fire chief I know used to say that the best part about being a firefighter, is we get the opportunity to change the way the story ends,” Dom Bei told me in our interview.
Bei is a Santa Monica firefighter turned bitcoin advocate who is now working with pension funds to incorporate bitcoin into their investment strategies.
Bei assisted the Santa Monica firefighter union in becoming the first union to ever collectively self-custody bitcoin. He is now turning these efforts into Proof of Workforce; a nonprofit Bei created to support bitcoin education for blue collar workers and pension funds.
His efforts have also expanded into the podcasting realm. In addition to being a regular guest speaker on the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast, Bei has also spearheaded the effort to create The Nakamoto Gauntlet podcast.
The Nakamoto Gauntlet podcast is a live discussion between bitcoin advocates and portfolio managers as they explore adding bitcoin to their investment.
They leverage the Nakamoto Portfolio, an open-source tool created by Swan Bitcoin’s CIO, Raphael Zagury. It allows portfolio managers to analyze the impact of adding bitcoin to their portfolio.
Bei believes that the next wave of bitcoin adoption will come from large institutions like pension funds. To ensure longevity in this endeavor, education of the participants of these institutions will be more important than ever.
He remains optimistic that bitcoin adoption will only continue to grow, and that as the market cap expands, more pension funds will be able to invest.
“We think Bitcoin should be, at the very least, a small part of every portfolio, and that it may be especially important in the decades to come for our demographic,” Dan and Josh told me in our interview, expressing the importance they place on the nascent asset.
Dan & Josh are firefighters and paramedics who work together in Illinois. After their passion for economics led them to bitcoin, they decided to start the Blue Collar Bitcoin Podcast in 2021 to help educate others.
“Our overall mission is to assist in educating the everyday investor, wage earner, and entrepreneur regarding economics, finance, and… bitcoin,” they told me in our interview, explaining the intent behind their podcast.
“Like many podcast stories, we started with just a few of our buddies listening and we’ve scaled to what we’ll call medium sized, with about 50,000 listens a month,” they said about their growth. To date, Dan and Josh have produced 126 episodes.
Current monetary policy may be taking its toll on the financial security of blue collar workers across the world. Bonds and interest rates have an inverse relationship. The higher interest rates rise, the lower bond prices go, depressing one of the key assets held by pension funds.
Nearly one year ago, the Bank of England executed emergency measures to prop up bond prices in the wake of a pension crisis. Eventually the treasury announced that they would “fully indemnify” losses, in an attempt to stem the bleeding.
The domestic situation appears less dire, but there may be issues developing beneath the surface. “As things stand today, the five state pension systems collectively have… a staggering unfunded liability of $139 billion,” Ralph Martire stated in an August article published by the Chicago Sun Times.
“Bitcoin sits in a position to help workers all over the world by changing the way our financial story ends,” Bei concluded. Advocates like Bei and the Blue Collar Bitcoin team hope that as bitcoin grows, pension funds and blue-collar workers will be able to turn to the asset as protection against future uncertainty.
