Interview from Michael Saylor

Sven Henrich (aka Northman Trader on Twitter) has published a fantastic (and long) interview with Michael Saylor. Rather sceptical about bitcoin until now, Sven was open-minded. At the end of the interview, he even said he was ready to invest very soon.

An informative Straight Talk
Saylor sometimes comes across as a guru, but not in this very informative interview. If you don't have time, start at the 52nd minute. If you're not an Anglophile, here's a translation of some interesting passages.

"Cryptocurrencies, for the most part, are not currencies at all. Crypto' is a misnomer that creates a lot of confusion. [...] A lot of people are speculating in "crypto" without having a long-term thesis on what they are doing. This is how I segment the market. There are four categories:

Bitcoin is the king of "digital property". It is designed to last a very long time. 100 years, 100,000 years. Imagine your family has owned a piece of land in central London for 100 years. When would you sell it? Never! Do you want to sell it? No! How are you going to live off it? You'll rent it out. But land is not a currency... If you own 10 buildings in NY and the FED prints 10% more of the money supply every year, you can indeed expect your buildings to appreciate by 10% a year as well because it is a desirable and scarce asset. But it is not a currency. This is the first category: Digital property

The second category is "digital currencies" such as Tether, Circle (USDC), Diem (facebook) or CBDCs. These are digital assets in the form of stable currencies. They are an intermediary of exchange. If you want a decentralised, very fast exchange intermediary that can transfer $50 million from Zimbabwe to the United Arab Emirates on a Saturday afternoon, outside the FED's networks, outside the banking system; if you want to pay every Salvadoran $37 on their phone, you have to use a digital currency. That's no small thing. Eight billion people need a currency. Money is the intermediary of exchange and its purpose is to act as a store of value.

Third category: "digital platforms". Ethereum is a platform for creating applications such as decentralised exchanges, insurance, companies, NFTs. Their mission is to create decentralised applications. When you buy ETH, you buy a digital asset, a token that gives you a share in the environment of this platform.

Fourth category, "decentralised applications". Uniswap for example. They are trying to replace NASDAQ, Coinbase. Binance smartchain is trying to replace Binance (a centralized exchange).

Good. Now imagine I give your family a billion dollars. You can choose between buying a billion dollars worth of land in London, or buildings, or the equivalent of a billion dollars in British pounds, or companies that are housed in those buildings. Okay? Well, the British pound is the equivalent of digital currency, the land is the equivalent of digital property, the buildings are the digital platforms and the companies are the decentralised applications. You can understand the good and bad of each of these categories. The land will still be there in 500 years... But not the building, which won't be there in 100 years. Nor the businesses."

Michael Saylor says in essence that bitcoin is not a currency but a digital asset. This is a way of beating around the bush in order to avoid any murderous legislation. On the understanding that bitcoin is an "asset", a "property", the law ensures that no one will be able to prohibit it.


The CEO of Microstrategy is playing cat-and-mouse with the FED and the US deep state, which will do anything to protect the petrodollar, the centrepiece of US imperialism. He goes on to speak on behalf of the Salvadorians when he says: "In El Salvador, they want the Digital Dollar (CBDC) to make their purchases, but they want the bitcoin asset as a long-term store of value.

Here is another very interesting passage on how Michael Saylor sees bitcoin:

"When I invest in the stock market, I want to buy a stock that 99% of people disapprove of but everyone needs and no one can stop. That's how I described Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and even Microsoft in 2010-2012. Amazon already accounted for all online sales in 2012. They buried everyone. They had 89% of the market. The stock was worth $50, but everyone on Wall Street was talking about diversifying their portfolio by selling Amazon to buy other merchants; selling Apple to buy the other companies. The problem with that is that Amazon won; Wallmart held on; but the other 25,000 merchants failed. To bet on them was to lose. To bet on Wallmart was to win, but it was Amazon that broke the bank. The same with Apple. [...] Everyone lost money trying to compete with Apple. The winner takes all. So diversifying is like selling Microsoft to buy the one Microsoft is destroying. Selling Amazon to buy Toy'sR'Us. Selling Facebook to buy the losers. Selling Google to buy newspapers. It doesn't make sense. [...]

Now the macro investor in me says I need to find a non-sovereign store of value that is not a currency derivative. The reason I chose bitcoin is because the dollar is a currency derivative, debt is a currency derivative, a stock is a currency derivative, real estate is a currency derivative. The only things that are not a currency derivative are art, gold, maybe some residential real estate but also crypto. I'm going to keep the most liquid, the most irrefutable, the one with the most potential. And that's bitcoin.

The technology investor in me says (pause), if you read my book The mobile wave, I say if you want to educate 8 billion people, you have to extract the information from the books and the bookstores of universities and dematerialize them. Then you can give education to everyone for very little money. If you want to give the world intelligence, you extract geological data from a hundred million satellite photos, put it in an Android device and call it Google map; then you measure how fast people are moving, plug in an AI and the device can drive your car. A digital map is a million times better than a paper map. A million times cheaper too. That's why Google map is worth 50 billion while Rand McNally map is only worth 50 million. The same goes for books. You can hold a million books in your hand for nothing. The same goes for music. You can access all the music in the world with Amazon music for $3 a month.

What's happening here is that platforms are dematerialising products or services. They are absorbing the value of CDs, videos, orchestras, bookstores and so on. They absorb the value in real life and put it into cyber space. When you dematerialise social energy, you get facebook. A thousand billion dollars. When you dematerialize information and education, you get google. A thousand billion dollars. When you dematerialize all objects, you get Apple and its iPhone. When you dematerialize merchants, you get Amazon. Anyway, coming back to bitcoin, I see it as a digital property that dematerializes the monetary energy that is in gold, silver, currencies, buildings, land. Anything that has value.

If you want to leave $100,000 to your descendants, what are you going to buy to keep that $100,000 intact; not taxed, stolen, devalued in 100 years? Land? Gold? Apple stock? Artwork? Or Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the hardest to tax, the hardest to steal. It's the most mobile. It's decentralized."