Looking past his controversies, Saylor’s insightful views will make you question your Bitcoin thesis.
Saylor is the prodigal son of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Maximalists love him because he’s a man of the people and speaks like a radicalised church pastor, straight from the book of Blockchain faith.
He’s not everyone’s cup of tea and certainly has an ulterior motive when he speaks about the most popular Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
I wrote an article at length about his background and some of the controversies and achievements that surround Saylor that you can read here.
Michael Saylor’s most recent explanation about Bitcoin is the most important in History.
While many people will use his outlandish comments as a stick to beat him with, there’s a reason his business MicroStrategy has survived three recessions and, even without their Bitcoin holdings, have a value of over a Billion Dollars.
The company’s track record displays a considerable safety signal with 40+ patents for the technology they’ve invented.
MicroStrategy is now the most significant corporate holder of Bitcoin in the World.
Michael Saylor:
“Bitcoin, as the world’s most widely-adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash.”
Saylor’s insightful views will make you question your Bitcoin thesis even if you’re on the fence about Bitcoin.
Property for most people over the years has been a store of value solution.
You get a mortgage out on a property and pay it over 30 years, and you have inbuilt savings account while the property also goes up in value.
Win-win if you live in a country where you have land ownership rights.
The problem with a property is you can’t fractionise its value into a thousand pieces and transport its value across the world in a few seconds.
Michael Saylor:
“The inability to store your economic energy in the form of property or money over time is an economic death sentence.”
“It’s hard to break off a tenth of your building and buy a car with a tenth of a building — property, unlike bitcoin, can’t act as money”.
In interviews, Saylor often quizzed on the short-term price dynamics of Bitcoin and why the price is so volatile.
He believes that if you buy Bitcoin, you should see it like any other property purchase.
When you buy a house, you don’t look at the price fluctuations a month after moving in, and he uses the example of fine art; these are all investments with a buy-and-hold thesis.
Michael Saylor:
“If you’re going to buy any long-dated asset — but especially if you’re going to buy property, and bitcoin — if you wouldn’t hold it for a decade, you shouldn’t hold it for 10 minutes.”
“There’s a reason you can’t live off the money you’ve saved from working all your life: the store of value option is broken.
So people make their best guess and invest in risky single assets like GameStop.”
Saylor strongly believes Bitcoin is digital Gold without Gold’s storage and portability issues.
He even aims fire at Gold’s energy usage, knowing that Bitcoin mining is very much under the magnifying glass.
Michael Saylor:
“The problem with Gold is I can’t quickly move it around.
I want to move $1 billion of Gold to Tokyo, which takes three months and $5 million.
I can’t decompose it and recompose it”.
Saylor also believes Gold may lose its value as Bitcoin picks up more market share. Goldman Sachs shares this view and accepts Bitcoin will overtake Gold as an asset class by 2030.
Michael Saylor:
“The problem with Gold coins is that they will only be worth one-tenth as much in 100 years or 50 years as today”.
Saylor believes Cryptocurrency isn’t a suitable term for Bitcoin because it isn’t a currency.
He sees Bitcoin as digital property rights, allowing economic empowerment, particularly in unbanked and impoverished countries.
Michael Saylor:
“Cryptocurrency’ is the worst term because, legally, it’s not a currency.
The problem is that most people equate money with currency, so they get caught in the same cognitive trap.”
“Crypto property’ is much better.”
Saylor believes Bitcoin is not competing with the Dollar because it’s not a currency. Currencies are a medium of exchange without a taxable event.
He also thinks characterising Bitcoin as a currency is where El Salvador, the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender, got a lot of friction.
Michael Saylor:
“El Salvador has a lot of friction because they characterise Bitcoin as currency, not property.
If they had said, we’re going to use the dollar as a medium of exchange, and then we’re going to use Bitcoin as a store of value.
And bitcoin is property, and the dollar is currency; you would have none of those sparks flying around.”
I wrote a full-length article on El Salvador here — El Salvador’s Bitcoin Mad President Lost His Country $61.6 Million.
Perhaps the most considerable criticism Saylor sets himself up for is his divisive stance against echo warriors who believe Bitcoin uses excessive energy.
He disagrees.
Saylor believes Bitcoin mining is the most efficient, cleanest industrial electricity use and is improving its energy efficiency faster across any significant industry.
On his website Saylor.com, he used metrics from the Bitcoin Mining Council that shows 59.5% of energy for Bitcoin mining comes from sustainable sources.
It also shows that energy efficiency for Bitcoin mining improves by 46% Year on year.
The improvements are primarily to do with the need for miners to want to draw a profit and the public pressure they are under from the government to become more Echo friendly.
Michael Saylor:
“No other industry comes close, planes, trains, automobiles, healthcare, banking, construction, precious metals, the Bitcoin network keeps getting more energy efficient because of the relentless improvement in the semiconductors that power the Bitcoin mining centres.
You combine this with the halving of Bitcoin mining rewards built into the protocol every four years.
Energy usage results in a consistent 18–36% improvement year after year in energy efficiency”.
Interestingly Saylor projects Bitcoin’s energy usage as its fundamental strength.
I believe it’s Bitcoin’s Achille’s heel in the short term.
He made these statements in light of the Ethereum merge event, which made the ETH network 99.5% more energy-efficient overnight.
These were his comments before Ethereum’s Merge event.
Michael Saylor:
“Bitcoin is substantially complete, and Ethereum is substantially incomplete.
It’s a problem with Vitalik’s philosophy, the idea that we can imagine anything up; it’s unhinged from reality.
You create a piece of software and realise it doesn’t work. All the proof of stake cryptos are very romantic.
The idealism makes them inappropriate as money and a commodity.
Bitcoin is attempting to be a digital asset without an issuer”.
After the successful completion of the Ethereum Merge, Saylor questioned the lack of time-tested information about Ethereum, which led to concerns about the protocol’s technical reliability and security.
Michael Saylor:
“‘Technically sound means I need to see the protocol function for about five to 10 years.
If you are hard forking and changing it, you introduce new attack surfaces every time you do a significant upgrade,
Saylor now casts doubt on the ethical soundness of Ethereum.
“‘Ethically sound’ means I need to know that no one at the Ethereum and no individual can change the protocol.
Including Vitalik.
Because if they could change the protocol, it makes it a security, and if it makes it a Security, then it’s not going to become global money,”
I’ve always disagreed with Saylor’s stance of not acknowledging Ethereum’s Smart Contract capabilities or even recognising its drastic improvement in energy usage, which people globally care about environmental factors.
It’s almost as if he feels threatened.
Saylor has 130,000 Bitcoin, so I can see why he would have a partisan view. I tend to ignore his one sided stance because I believe Bitcoin and Ethereum complement each other well in the echo system.
I admire Saylor because he is intensely engrossed in building the future of Bitcoin and wants the world to have the same self-sovereign access, especially people in underdeveloped countries who now have a tool for economic empowerment.
Bitcoin is the fastest-growing technology in human history and the best-performing asset in the last decade.
It’s being adopted at twice the pace of the internet.
Regardless if you think Bitcoin is a great asset or a Ponzi scheme, you need to ask yourself if the technology will stop and the adoption rate will backtrack.
I don’t think so.
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This article is for informational purposes only; it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. You can consult a financial professional before making any significant financial decisions.