#276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money

My advice if you're entering adulthood: Focus your energy, guard your time, train your mind, train your body, think for yourself, curate your friends, curate your environment, keep your promises, stay cheerful and constructive, and upgrade the world.

Bitcoin is the most difficult property that the human race possesses or has yet invented to confiscate—and that's by virtue of the fact that you could take possession of it via your private key. So, if you got your 12 seed phrases in your head, then that would be the highest form of property, because I literally have to crack your head open and read your mind to take it. It doesn't mean I couldn't extract it from you under duress, but it means that it's harder than every other thing you might own. In fact, it's exponentially harder.

We could create $100T of value in the real world simply by building applications on top of Bitcoin as a foundation. Continually trying to reinvent the wheel and create competitive things is a massive waste of time, and it's a diversion of human creativity.

Life is hopeless for a lot of people, and Bitcoin is hope—because it gives everyone an engineered monetary asset that's a better instrument, and it gives them a bank on their mobile phone, and they don't have to trust their government or another counterparty with their life force.

Bitcoin is magical, and it is truly innovation. It's like a singularity, because it represents the first time in the history of the human race that we managed to create a digital property, properly understood.

I believe that Bitcoin is a massive breakthrough for the human race that will cure half the problems in the world and generate hundreds of trillions of dollars of economic value to the civilization.

I can move any amount of Bitcoin in a matter of minutes for dollars on layer 1. But the second important feature of layer 1 is I need the money to last forever. I need the money indestructible and immortal. So, the bigger trick is not to move a billion dollars from here to Tokyo; the big trick is to move a billion dollars from here to the year 2140.

I think the entire crypto economy is very embryonic and the human race's adoption of it is embryonic. We're like 1-2% down that adoption curve.

If there was a Satoshi sitting around sitting on top of $50B worth of Bitcoin, I don't think it would cripple Bitcoin as property, but I think it would undermine its digital property. If wanted to undermine a crypto asset network, I would do the opposite of all those things.

I think that the big cloud looming over the crypto industry is regulatory treatment of cryptocurrencies and regulatory treatment of crypto securities and crypto platforms. And I think that won't be determined until the end of the first Biden administration.

Bitcoin's the most efficient use of energy in the world by far ... If you were to take any metric of energy intensity; you put, like, $2 billion worth of electricity in the network every year, and it's worth $850 dollars; there is no industry in the real world that is that energy efficient.