Michael Saylor Bitcoin Park Interview: Full Transcript

From the outset of the Michael Saylor Bitcoin park interview, he noted that there are clear signs of bitcoin adoption worldwide.The presence of various Wall Street representatives, along with companies like Marathon, which are heavily involved in bitcoin mining, reflects a significant shift in attitudes towards bitcoin over the past few years.

The gathering at Bitcoin Park was an energetic convergence of enthusiasts and professionals from diverse fields. Michael Saylor, co-founder of MicroStrategy and a vocal advocate for bitcoin, shared his perspectives on the rapid evolution of bitcoin and the growing interest from various sectors.

Key Takeaways

1. Bitcoin Adoption: From the start of the Michael Saylor Bitcoin park interview, he noted that there are clear signs of bitcoin adoption worldwide.There are significant signs of growing interest from governments, corporations, and the financial sector, indicating a shift in how bitcoin is perceived.
2. Regulatory Challenges: The need for clear regulatory frameworks and custody solutions is crucial for corporate investments in bitcoin.
3. Transactional Currency Issues: Bitcoin faces hurdles as a transactional currency due to high costs and regulatory complexities, limiting its everyday use.
4. Taxation Impacts: How governments tax bitcoin can significantly influence its adoption and practicality as an asset.
5. Government Involvement: Saylor anticipates that more governments may begin to adopt bitcoin accumulation strategies similar to what companies like MicroStrategy have done.
6. Long-term Perspective: Bitcoin is viewed as a defensive and productive asset that can secure value in an uncertain economic landscape, with an emphasis on maintaining low costs and high cash flow.
7. Optimism for the Future: The collective enthusiasm from the conference reflects a belief in bitcoin’s potential to transform finance and society.

What a week Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here. This Bitcoin Park welcome is kind of crazy huh so a lot of birds and bees buzzing around your Park. I apologised to Michael before we got on stage uh the backstage was actually a little bit hotter than it is in here but it’s quite hot with all the well all the heads in the room so um our air conditioning is a work in progress we’re trying our best here.

It’s a small Grassroots iterating project um to those that are not aware Bitcoin Park is supported by our members um so we have members that support us on an annual basis and that’s who makes this possible uh by a show of hands who here is a member of Bitcoin Park? Thank you guys, it would not be possible without you.

Okay well Michael’s time is short so let’s just get into it. First of all Michael it’s been absolutely crazy watching your Bitcoin Journey uh you just go 0 to 60 and just aped right into the space in a big way. When you think about this week I mean what are you looking at right now? How how are you thinking about the space? How have we gotten so far so fast? And how do you think about that basically? I guess well I mean I think we just see great signs of bitcoin adoption throughout the world. 

Bitcoin is an issue so the fact you have Governors that have interests. The fact you have a lot of senators that have interests. The fact you have a lot of Congress people that have interests. The fact that you have two of the three major presidential candidates that have interests. The fact that you’ve got tons and tons of uh wall streeters you know, you’ve got representatives from Fidelity and Black rock and the like that’s interesting. The fact you’ve got a bunch of operating companies you know publicly traded operating companies like Marathon that are here in size, I mean there’s a big sponsor and all the other public and private bitcoin miners I think you would have seen the bitcoin miners private. 

You roll the clock back four years; you didn’t see any public operating companies, you didn’t see any public Investment Trust, you didn’t really see any politicians. I don’t think they would have; well first of all they they just wouldn’t have any interest in it other than squash it out like a bug like maybe negative interest but no positive interest and you know, not a lot of enthusiasm and now I think they can’t help but be interested so I think sometimes, the message is the message.

Sometimes half of success in life is just showing up right? The fact that you’re there is sending the message regardless of what comes out of your mouth and I know in the world of say public companies or Wall Street the worst thing is not for someone to hate you the worst thing is for them to be indifferent to you and view you as irrelevant.

So you know that’s a A Kiss of Death if you’re irrelevant, I don’t even think about you. A lot of people don’t like Tesla stock and a lot of people short it but it’s not a problem. Well you know there’s probably 20 billion dollar of short interest in micro strategy but then they go long bitcoin and I think it’s good they just get up every day and they like hate on us or like on us it doesn’t matter what matters is they’re engaged and so I think this week is all about engagement. 

You just see engagement across there are celebrities, there are politicians, there are investors, then there are bitcoiners, and then there are the engineers and the Technologies they all come together and this is presumably it feels like this is the richest like most uh most energetic Gathering of uh Bitcoin in a long time maybe the one that I remember is most energetic yeah I mean it seems absolutely unreal to me

I remember my first Bitcoin conference was in 2013 in New York and it was just like an empty exhibitor hole you know. There were a bunch of companies that had booths that they paid for that no one was standing at. Some of them had Booth babes that they overpaid for and most of those businesses have gone out of business and if you look at the last 10 years and 11 years it’s been absolutely astounding the pace of growth of this space. It definitely feels like it’s accelerating even just this week feels like a decade almost in terms of progress, in terms of bitcoin’s recognition. I mean I agree with you, you definitely cannot argue that bitcoin is irrelevant,it’s definitely more relevant than it’s ever been; we have more haters than we’ve ever had, we’ve had more lovers than we’ve ever had, and it’s just been crazy to watch.

So Michael you have basically made a name for yourself with turning Microstrategy, turning your baby into this bitcoin accumulation machine. I’ve had this thesis for a long time that every single individual, every single government, every single company is going to try and accumulate as much bitcoin as possible. That is the ultimate goal and most just don’t realise it yet and the people that realise it first have the most to gain. Since you’ve embarked on that strategy, we’ve seen it actually kind of took a little bit longer than maybe even you expected.

It definitely took longer than I expected but we’re starting to see smaller public companies around the world try and adopt a similar strategy. I’m kind of curious how you think about that. What do you think about these smaller public companies; I mean one example would be The Meta Planet that’s happening in Japan where they just said we’re going to do the Microstrategy thing in a press release and the stock kind of just goes wild.

You know I’ve got a chart that I tweet and the chart shows that bonds are minus 5% ARR for the past four years and bitcoin is plus 55%. So if you’re an operating Company by law you’re only up until January of this year. By law you had to invest your excess capital in treasuries and you couldn’t invest it in the S&P index and you know an operating company can’t reasonably hold their excess assets in real estate, timber rights sports teams and Apple stock.

The reason is not well talked about but the reason Berkshire hathaway; for example, has so much cash is because they can’t buy the S&P index and they can’t buy more Apple stock because they would trip a 40% Covenant or limit that’s put in place by the SEC 40 act. If the company gets more than 40% of its liquid assets in a security it’s no longer an operating company and that means it can’t take on debt it can’t issue options it basically blows up the company. You become an Investment Trust. 

So for 100 years and 80 years the law forces operating companies to hold their excess capital in an asset which is losing 5% of its economic energy, 5% of its purchasing power per year. When 2020 came along you know we were pushed in the bitcoin space but there are really three crippling defects that keep a company from swapping out bonds for bitcoin or basically putting bitcoin in and bonds out.

The first thing is you need the SEC to endorse it as an Institutional or a legitimate asset class; a digital commodity and not a security. It’s either illegal because you can’t, it’s illegal to own Apple stock you know and so definitely you don’t want to have an unregistered security. So we had to have a digital commodity first step and we kind of got 75% of the way there in January.

It’s not a perfected endorsement, it’s a grudging endorsement with reservation but we cross the Event Horizon you can’t turn that back. The second thing that’s required is fair accounting. You can’t invest in something that you only lose money in and you never make money in. Just simple right no one wants to invest and always lose money and never make money but the accounting rules before January were you can only lose money in bitcoin and so nobody is going to buy an asset that always gets written down and never gets written up. So that got optionally fixed in January.

That’s mandatory Fair Accounting next January, that’s the second stool leg of the stool and the Third Leg of the stool is Google can wire a billion dollars to JP Morgan every month and say put it in t- bills and it’s like 15 seconds. If JP Morgan loses it, it’s JP Morgan’s problem. The status quo right now is Google would have to wire a billion dollars a month to coinbase while the SEC is trying to put coinbase out of business.

They’d have to cross with a cross river bank, like a bank you’ve never heard of that’s the only bank that will actually take the wire so the CFO of Google is not going to be so interested in wiring billions and tens of billions of dollars to a crypto exchange as a custodian. They want State Street, they want City Group; City Bank is the pred, the successor to National City Bank. National City Bank was run by the brother of John D Rockefeller, it was the Rockefeller bank. So if you want a sense of how long these relationships run, 30 years is a short period of time.

The third piece we need is we need Banks to be able to custody bitcoin and then they can buy it for you, sell it for you, loan money against it and then in that world you will be able to get a margin loan at Sofr plus 50 basis points against your bitcoin. You will probably get five percent interest, you’ll probably get the same interest rate on bitcoin as you get on a money market fund. If you had those two things; then a corporate it’s like a hundred billion dollars of bitcoin going up 20% a year yielding 5% with no risk and a bank too big to fail is causing the headache. You could imagine Apple might say put $50 billion dollars in bitcoin so we don’t have that third thing we’re kind of in year one.

You could say we’re year zero, because year one is you get the third thing and you get the endorsement without prejudice you know. I would say that we’re six months in now you have 50,000 publicly traded companies; they’re all capitalised on toxic credit which is collapsing you know. One of the points of my speech is that if you build your company on a capital asset with a 10-year useful life, your company is going to last 10 years and so all these companies have a 10 to 20 year life because they’re sitting on an effective Capital asset. The driver for them to switch from bonds to bitcoin is bitcoin’s got a useful life of 10,000 years.

If you self- custody it, your maintenance cost is you know one basis point or something. So the useful life of bitcoin is thousands of years. The useful life of a bond is a Dozen Years or 20 years; the regulatory impediment keeps mainstream companies and institutions from doing it because it’s too much trouble and 2024 is that first year. So the reason that they’re kind of creeping into it right now is finally you can sort of do it.

It’s a lot of effort to figure out who you’re going to custody with. and how you’re going to buy it right now and you can buy it for 65,000 because you’re doing the effort. When JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs do this, it’ll be easy and it will cost $500,000 so you get 85% discount if you do the work and you take a little bit of risk. If you did it in 2020 you would have got a 98% discount, if you came in in 2013 you got a 99.8% discount but that was a lot more risk and a lot more work. 

You know a lot of these in institutions; they’re just like if I can make a phone call in 30 seconds and say buy $10 billion of bitcoin they’ll do it but if they have to work harder they’ll study it for three years and then they won’t do it because why should they take that risk? So we’re in that transition but I guess that makes sense to me; I mean risk reward. I have a friend who always says the best way to measure how long someone’s been in bitcoin is not how much bitcoin they own but how much bitcoin they’ve lost just because it was incredibly risky and also it’s very easy to not stay humble and to lose your coin on various schemes. 

I guess where I’m going with it is this is something that I’m intimately focused on because of my work at Ten31. So at Ten31 we’re a venture firm that specialises in the bitcoin space. We have a portfolio of 36 bitcoin startups. You know they’re all trying to accumulate as much bitcoin as possible, that is their goal. I’m trying to separate in my head where at some point it can’t. I think there’s some companies out there that are just kind of riding on almost like a cheap , cheap trick strategy; it’s like we say we accumulate some bitcoin. They don’t actually have a business model, they don’t have a competitive advantage to outperform the hardest asset of all time. 

At some point that evaporates and we kind of haven’t hit that yet but at the core what I look at is low expenses. Keep your expenses as low as possible, keep your cash flow as high as possible and just try to accumulate as much bitcoin on the balance sheet while growing in a responsible way. Would you agree with me on that front that there’s a lot of kind of just say bitcoin or say AI right and as a result your stock pumps and I’m obviously not accusing Microstrategy of that, I mean I think you’ve proven that the stock is a creative and as you hold the stock you gain more bitcoin over time. I think that every business has got a P&L and it’s got a balance sheet and the p&l is the operation, it’s what you do and the balance sheet is how you save what you do. 

So the people that have it very easy are the people that can make lots of money right now; people that started with the money right? If you’ve already got the money and you just could move it from a bond to bitcoin; then you moved it from minus 5% a year to plus 50% a year and that not hard right. It’s very hard to compete with Microsoft, like it’s very hard to compete with Amazon, it’s very hard to compete with Google.

It’s very hard to compete with Apple; all of those companies are examples where they wiped out 20,000 competent healthy hardworking companies. Like if you ever been in the retail business; every single retailer except Walmart got wiped out by Amazon. There’s nothing wrong with those people; they’re good people, they work hard, they work themselves to death but at the end of the day it’s you know the same with Microsoft. 

They have a monopoly on every on 80 million businesses and they sold them their software for three years and so I think that if you’re asking me, is it easy to create a business in the modern world? My answer is; it’s not easy, you can do it. I mean Mr Beast can. You know it happens right? Random stuff happens, but it’s hard. If you ask me for advice in entertainment versus medicine versus law versus software versus whatever, I would say I’m not an expert in any of those things. I would say probably you ought to look at AI because it’s probably going to you know disrupt and obliterate anything that’s labour intensive, the distribution is getting disrupted and so that’s hard on the other side.

The bitcoin balance sheet strategy; it’s actually quite easy right? The reason I talk about bitcoin as your choice is lose 5% of your money with Bob or make you know if it’s 50% right now right my my forecast is on average the ARR is going to be 25, 30% over the next 20 years so if it goes the worst case for me, is it’s got to go up faster and perform better than the S&P index and if the S&P is 10 to 12 then bitcoin is 20 to 22 so I basically talk about that which I know I don’t give advice to people on on that which I don’t know.

The sad fact is if I were to tell you there’s a 99% chance a startup will fail, I might be overstating your chances of success. 99% of the S&P 500 is failing right now; yep I mean there’s five companies and the S&P 500. Everybody’s saying how do I compete with Nvidia? And that includes Apple and Tesla saying I don’t know if we can right?

What you will see is a rise of trillion dollar corporations because someone’s going to give all the medical advice to billions of people with AI doctors without an employee and whoever figured that out is going to make a lot of money and it’s going to make Medical Care cheaper. It’s going to put a lot of people in the middle out of business and there’ll be disruption so I don’t think that bitcoin is a big deal. 

Bitcoin won’t make your startup that competes with Microsoft compete better right? It’s not going to make you, it’s not going to help you build better cars than Tesla. The dude that creates the humanoid robot that’s as smart as a million Phds you know that actually you can buy for 100 bucks a month, they’re probably going to sell a lot of them and the dude that creates the second best humanoid robot nobody will want to buy it.

Nobody wants the second best of anything right? They just want the one, they want the best one and they’re going to sell a billion. So you know I think the summary of that is sometimes people think that by doing something with bitcoin it will generate a P&L for them; it’s like okay I’m going to launch a bitcoin exchange and I’m going to compete with Fidelity or with Morgan Stanley or with Vanguard. 

It’s like just because you sell and buy in custody bitcoin doesn’t mean it’s easy to displace Fidelity and so I think you have to have humility there and like in our journey for example we got into bitcoin you know we now have 15 billion dollars of bitcoin. But I’m not selling bitcoin to hire Engineers to compete with Microsoft, see it would be like throwing good money after bad right? I mean so what is a good idea? Well I mean our idea is to securitize bitcoin. There are a lot of people who want the upside of bitcoin but no downside right? Have you ever met people who like to make a lot of money but with no volatility and no risk? many such cases.

Okay so how do you buy bitcoin at the all-time high and not lose money and then make money if it goes up? Well you buy a convertible Bond. If I sell you a convertible bond with 70% upside, that’s 5x over collateralized on the downside. And if Microstrategy guarantees you to give back your principle it’s like I’m guaranteeing you’ll get your money back in six years but if bitcoin goes up you’ll also get the warrant and so you’re getting half the upside none of the down or 5% of the downside. Half the upside and that’s the security and so if you think about that, we’re just stripping the volatility or we’re stripping the risk off the bottom. 

There are a lot of people for which, for example; if you go up to a typical investor and you said what would you like 20% return ;no volatility, no you know little risk or 50% return, lots of volatility? Most will tell you 20% even though that’s the wrong answer right? It’s the wrong one, I mean you’re going to take 20 instead of 55? Well I just don’t want the volatility? So what we do is we simply strip away the volatility and the risk and give them what they want but other companies in the bitcoin space if your idea is you’re going to create a mobile app that let you buy and sell bitcoin, you’re competing against cash app and cash app is you know are holding their own.

They’re gonna have to compete against Apple and Google and Robin Hood and look there are Robin hoods; I mean there are successful businesses but at the end of the day if there’s a theme to this business it is hard like launching a business and growing a business.

It’s hard investing; it’s hard when you look at every public company you try to guess if their stock is overvalued or undervalued versus their cash flow forecast. That’s hard. It’s not hard to say it’s a good company, it’s hard to say whether the stock price is a good entry point right? Investing is hard, saving is hard under the Fiat standard but under the Bitcoin standard, if your goal is I have some money I’m gonna hold it for four years that’s easy. I buy Bitcoin if I’m going to hold it for four years, it doesn’t matter what the volatility is and from there you know.

Business is hard man, business is you know there’s something happening in the world which is like; how does anybody sell software to a corporation if Microsoft look what they did with slack, look what they did with zoom. They will just take your slack and make it teams and put it into their three-year Enterprise deal and you have to buy it and they will take Zoom and put it into teams and put it in the three-year deals and you have to buy it.

It would be easier for a company to leave the US than to leave Microsoft just like Apple, not that different right? I mean how many people want to throw away their Apple phone and switch to a new ecosystem? They’ve got your stuff so businesses can’t switch and if they do switch they switch to Google right in both your examples like mic you leave Microsoft teams you go to Google suite and what’s the third choice.

Yeah like so, business is hard and it’s not that you can’t create new opportunities, but bitcoin. What bitcoin offers is you can either use it to escape the bond conundra, or if you’re a private company that can raise money, or if you’re a public company that can raise money, you can securitize bitcoin because there are large pools of capital that people have where they have to buy a security.

For example, a venture capitalist; they have to buy a security, a participating, a preferred stock in a private company that might go public. They have a billion dollars they can’t buy bitcoin, they can’t buy the ETF, they can’t buy land, they can’t buy art, they can’t buy a public operating company they just can’t it doesn’t matter whether it’s going to go up by a factor of a million; they can’t buy it.

Their Charter says spend the billion dollars on private Equity so you know they can’t buy bitcoin; but you can actually create a company with bitcoin on the balance sheet and go sell them a participating preferred stock with half of the return of bitcoin with none of the volatility. They don’t have to deal with the market, they don’t say it’s risking all your money on bitcoin, they’re like oh I made an interesting investment in a bitcoin based company.

They make 22%, if they get a 20% return and the S&P returns 12%; they’ll go back to their investors and raise 10 billion more dollars and the firemen’s pension fund will say “oh you beat the S&P, how much money do you want?” So they need to do that. The guys that buy my converts when I sell a convertible Bond, I have a one hour phone call.

I’m like; okay this is the bond, this what we’re going to do okay they buy 800 million of it at the end of the day okay. Why it’s like they have the money they have to buy a convertible Bond. they can’t.  They’re like why don’t they buy bitcoin? They can’t. Why don’t they buy your Equity? They can’t. They need to buy; there’s a phrase in Wall Street “if the ducks are quacking. feed the ducks.” They want that there’s another group of people, they want equity in a public company. They can’t buy the spot ETF, they can’t. 

It’s against their Charter, they get fired just can’t. Why don’t they? Well you’re questioning the world right I mean at the end of the day the world is made up of huge pools of capital and it might have taken 20 years to raise the money. Now I have to spend the money so if you are the entrepreneur, my general message is you can create a security that a capitalist can then use to get bitcoin exposure and if you’re public you sell public Equity or debt and buy bitcoin.

If you’re private; you’ll sell private Equity or private debt and buy bitcoin. If you can’t raise money, then you just gotta work very hard and get lucky and it’s hard. You’ll see a Zuckerberg on occasion, you’ll see some breakthroughs but you know it’s like it’s not easy and so my recommended strategy is not to work yourself to death. 

My recommended strategy is to notice that there is $450 billion of capital in bonds and real estate and traditional 20th century assets. There’s 1 trillion, so there’s 450 trillion in those things. There’s 1 trillion in bitcoin. You should be the conduit to move the next trillion dollars from the old world to the new world and the way you do it is by raising money with issuing securities to buy bitcoin and you self-custody it for them, buy it for them, take away the volatility, take away the downside risk you know and then solve the compliance issue. A Chinese billionaire has got to buy bitcoin through a Shanghai ETF otherwise he goes to jail right? That’s the problem you solve; it’s not as good as self- custody, it’s not as good as the raw bitcoin but that’s academic.

When you’ve got 10 billion dollars and your choice is buy a billion this way or go to jail or don’t buy any, the answer: the world is imperfect that’s why they call it Earth not heaven. Wonderful Michael, we have 15 minutes.  Want to be very conscious of your time. We have a hard stop here and I have 20 different directions. I like this conversation to go on so I hope this is the first of many. First and foremost, I just want to say I feel like there’s a little bit of an elephant in the room.

Michael and I have had multiple productive conversations in terms of supporting open resource development, we are not going to go there today. I don’t think that’s the best path for this conversation to take. I want to talk to you about your thoughts on bitcoin as a transactional currency um because I think it’s super interesting; uh being in the space with you because uh we agree on so much, and we have such different perspectives on bitcoin um but we end up in the same space like 99% we’re on the exact same page.

The transactional currency part might be where we differ the most. Let’s just chat about that. like how are you thinking about that right now? Okay well you know I think about energy, frequency and vibration. Every time you trade an asset, it’s a vibration and if you’re vibrating in a high friction environment or a high impedance environment, you’re bleeding off energy and so things that you can see. Things you can do in outer space forever you can do in the atmosphere for less and in the water not so much. So the real issue is when you’re doing a transaction.

What is the impedance and is there a source of physical impedance like for example what do I think of gold as a transactional currency? Well I don’t think it’s good because it’s hard to subdivide it and it’s hard to send it over the mail and so you can see how there’s a high energy cost to trade gold; high frequency, that’s why it died.

Um on the other hand, like what do I think of Apple stock as a transactional currency and here you’re just getting into politics in a country where Apple stock was legal tender. If it’s legal tender and I can send it to you and you could send it back to me and I can do it in one second with no tax, then you know; wow Apple stock is better than gold. Now what do I think of the dollar as legal, as a transactional currency?

Well what I think is I can send it back and forth a million times a day and I don’t have a million taxable events and so I don’t have to account for it. If I send a capital asset whether it’s a corporate bond or an equity bitcoin. If you’re in the US now; if I move. I’m moving it at high frequency and I’m incurring an account event and a taxable event and if you do the calculation, it just turns out that everything just costs 10 or 20% more. So I don’t.

If we were talking about a country; El Salvador; where it’s legal tender and I can move it back and forth a hundred times a month and there is no accounting event and there’s no taxable event, then my opinion is; if it’s satoshis on Lightning I kind of like it. If it’s satoshis over the base layer, I think at some point the friction is you know when it’s $3 a transaction yep there’s too much friction so I don’t like it on the base layer.

I do like it on the second layer but I would advise anybody that if you had a certain amount of money 95% of it should be held in the capital account, as bitcoin 5% should be in the local checking account and as a practical you’ve got real two two things. In Argentina, if everything is priced in the peso and then you have to have pesos.

I would probably buy them the hour before I had to spend them but I would buy them and on the other hand if something is legal tender, I’m much more likely to want to vibrate it or transact at high frequency and if it’s going to be taxed heavily you know; short-term capital tax right is like 35, 40% right.

So if I gave you a bitcoin and it was up you know, a bit. Here’s the thing I think we both agree on Matt which is that neither one of us think we should send all our money to the government right? Very true. I think that’s why for example tether has been so successful you know. I mean in theory a digital currency that’s just a dollar that’s pegged to the dollar at for high frequency checking you know and a digital property bitcoin which you can hold for the rest of your life as the property or the capital asset.

Those two pairs would allow you to go anywhere in the world and stay rich or stay wealthy and stay compliant and minimise what you want. You want to hold bitcoin forever and never pay capital gains. You don’t want to like you know and you never know you just want to hold it forever and then you want everything else to be quick and easy so that’s what I think on that subject.

I mean so you think the tax treatment is the major hurdle? So it’s more of a political regulatory kind of landscape issue. I think the government can basically destroy any asset by tax treatment. Like if they want to destroy it right; then for example you know here’s the best tax treatment: legal tender, no tax on it, you can hold it forever and you can transfer it and there’s no tax. What’s the second best? Which is capital gains or property.

What’s the last best property tax which is a tax on time. Like you’re holding it and I want 1% of it you; know I want 1% of the market value every year regardless of whether you trade it right and that’s the land tax in the US and that takes your money away from you in 35, 40 years. So I would say if the government passes a property tax on bitcoin, you should leave the country.

I would say if they’re going to tax capital gains, you should manage yourself: so you don’t have to transfer it very often; almost never. I would say if they made it legal tender, then you probably ought to move to that country. You ought to go the other direction. We haven’t talked about inheritance taxes yet, right? That’s the last part but I do think taxes are 40% of the equation; they matter a lot and generally the best strategies are strategies that allow you to defer tax or avoid tax and the worst strategies or strategies that accelerate the tax you’re either going to pay it or you’re not going to pay it.

Then you’ve got a legal liability, then you have to worry about that and then either way those strategies become uh a friction you know they become a problem. Yeah I mean, I think one of the earliest things uh you said when you became public in the space was that politics and people aren’t taking them seriously enough. I think just the last few weeks alone have proven you right. I mean just the panel before us was with our governor and one of our Senators. We have the former president of the United States going to be speaking at the largest Bitcoin conference in the world tomorrow. 

Um politics clearly matter um I think one of the cool Parts about uh Freedom Tech and bitcoin as Freedom money is it gives individuals more power when it comes to combating governments or not combating governments. Maybe that’s too critical of a word, but uh defending themselves and supporting their individual liberties um and as a result it levels the playing field a bit. That to me has always given me hope and I think uh you’ve always been really good you have hope.com. Bitcoin is hope; I mean we got Larry Frink out there saying bitcoin’s like the hedge against hope; it’s like the exact opposite to a degree. The opposite thing; yeah I think we can merge I think we can merge that but anyway.

Um Michael I’m curious, do you think we’re entering the era of nation state government fomo like are we about to start seeing you know the Microstrategy Playbook happen on a government scale? I think it’s positive that they’re all talking about it. The Overton window has shifted: a year ago no one would discuss it; now you’ve got, you know you’ve got Robert F Kennedy talking about, you’ve got a bunch of senators talking about it uh so I just think we start with the conversation. I keep my expectations low. I think we should all keep our expectations low but with the observation that when a government starts talking about owning it they legitimise it and that means what they’re not talking about is taking it away from you. So when they’re not talking about owning it; like if you look at the German government, they emergency sold it because it could go to zero.

The narrative of; it’s not an asset, and it’s a you know it’s a criminal thing, and it’s going to zero. That thing is pernicious and if you want to move forward you have to put a firm foundation. So I think when the government starts talking about it, that means that individuals and small companies will feel comfortable enough to move in.

They’ll move first, they’ll front run right? The government’s always going to be slow, it’s always going to be hamfisted, there’ll be a lot of fighting but I think the individuals and families will move. I think if the government’s considering it, it becomes a lot less risky for you to discuss it in the board meeting. So when I go into a boardroom and they ask me, I can say you know Microstrategy, but guess what, here are all the politicians of this bill and the question is will I get fired if I propose it?

So I think the Overton window is shifting. I’m not expecting you know, that a government’s going to buy a ton of bitcoin tomorrow and put it on the wire, I think I think you have to discount that. I do think we will over the next four years see some government start to take a position. It’ll probably come out of the blue, it’ll probably be someone you didn’t expect, and it’ll be a good thing. I generally think this plays out over Epic four years.

This is the early institutional phase, then another four then, another four yeah. I mean we’ve already seen the smaller Nations to a degree start bitcoin accumulation strategies. Uh obviously El Salvador is the one that’s on most people’s minds. I think it’s pretty cool that you could go to their like mempool instance and see they buy one Bitcoin a day which is like a nice little meme step chart up.

Um but like even countries like Bhutan; that we found out through bankruptcy reports that they were just quietly accumulating as much bitcoin as possible. Um but what is your take? What may or may not happen tomorrow? Uh do you believe the US Treasury should stack bitcoin? Yeah I mean I just came from a presentation on the stage and what I said was you know that the 10%er strategy for the US would be to buy 500,000 bitcoin, the BTC the Maxi strategy is they should buy a million, the double Maxi strategy is they should buy two million, and the triple Max strategy for the US is they ought to buy four million bitcoin over the next four years they would have like 18% of the of the supply and if they did that, they retire the debt and they flip to a massive Surplus and I you know my precedent is like the secret to success as a nation state is you have defensible productive property.

So the reason that the British Empire Rose is they had an island and it was hard to invade it. Nobody got to it after 1066 and on that island, they industrialised and then they got the colonies and that was defensible productive land. The reason the US Rose to power is the United States is defended by the Pacific on one side and the Atlantic on the other side. Frozen tundra to the north, a desert to the South; defensible, productive and what we do well. We bought Louisiana Territory, Jefferson did it for 15 million bucks and he bought 27% of the land mass.

Seward bought Alaska for 7 million dollars. The United States federal government owns 28% of the land in the US; we own whatever 18% of the gold or something so scarce desirable property but by productive property you can defend and so if hundreds of trillions of dollars are migrating to cyberspace right? My view is bitcoin’s going to demonetize Siberian real estate and Chinese real estate and everything in Africa and why would you want to own bonds of a South American company? Why would you want to own anything other than bitcoin? So as the capital flows you’re going to see hundreds of trillions of dollars there so if you’re the United States what are you worried about losing your world Reserve currency status.

Where’s the money going? Go to bitcoin. How do you hedge that just go to where everybody’s going and buy 20% of it and then when they get there you know you’ll be fine. Where else are you going to go right? For example if you’re going to sell the dollar right. You’re not selling the dollar for the peso, the Euro. Nobody wants any of that. So when you sell the dollar, you’re going to buy Siberian real estate? No, you’re going to buy bitcoin.

What’s the second best? You’re going to buy nothing. Second best? There is no second best right. So the point is you want a country, you want a country to be capitalised on a firm foundation. The foundation is productive property that no one can take away from you and bitcoin’s beautiful. It is productive because the IRS are going to want to move 10 billion dollars from you know here to there every hour. 

They’re not going to move $10 billion to buildings or silver right, or dollars. Lord knows they can’t get a bank account right. So everybody’s going to want the capital. If you want a company, a family, a country, to last and prosper like how well would your; how good would your family be if you owned 100 acres in the middle of Manhattan? Like how would you like to own a thousand square miles in Texas right? Something right, own something productive for a long time.

The catch is; you don’t want me to take it away from you, you don’t want them to tax it and you don’t want them to steal it from you and the beauty of bitcoin is: any country puts their money in cyberspace, nobody can steal it, nobody else can tax it.

So even though it’s brilliant for the US, it’s even a better idea for Switzerland or for Norway or for Turkey because there’s no point in invading your country to take your stuff if all your stuff is in cyberspace, so I’m a big believer. I think it’s good for the network. I think it decentralises us further. I mean it’ll be the source of a lot of interesting debates and dialogue but you know: if you believe you want, if you want to help the U.S, then give them productive digital capital and anybody else you want to help give them the same advice.

If you hate somebody, if you hate someone tell them to sell their bitcoin and don’t buy it right. That’s the worst you can do to anybody encourage them to not bitcoin because that’s like encouraging Russians to sell Alaska. It’s like Napoleon sold a third of America for 15 million bucks and blew it on bullets and blankets in the Napoleonic War. We still have a third of the United States; so who got the better trade? Bitcoin is beautiful and we should all stack as much as possible, stay humble all. Stack SATs let’s go.