Michael Saylor lays out why bitcoin beats property as a store of value and what crypto going mainstream would look like
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor discussed why Bitcoin is the most valuable store of value in a recent interview. This was shortly after Michael Saylor had promised to continue buying the digital assets even though it comes under increasing pressure.
On Thursday, the noted bitcoin evangelist shared his thoughts about digital assets becoming mainstream and why “cryptocurrency” isn’t the right terminology, on David McWilliams’ podcast.
These are Saylor’s top 10 quotes from the interview.
1. “If you are going to purchase any long-dated asset, but especially if it’s property or bitcoin, you should not hold it for more than a decade.
2. “The economic death sentence is the inability to store economic energy over time in the form property or money.
3. “Property is the solution. Property has a maintenance cost. This is the problem with property. A tax bill is also due every year for property – say, 2%, 1% or half a percent. This is the second problem.
4. “The third problem is that you cannot decompose property into millions of small pieces and ship it around the globe to recompose it. Property doesn’t really serve as money. It is difficult to sell a tenth or more of your building and purchase a car with the remaining tenth. Property, unlike bitcoin, cannot be used as money.
5. “The idea that you can work for 30 years and still save money is a great one. Why shouldn’t you be able to live on the money you have saved the rest of your lives? Because the store of value was destroyed. The result is that everyone is forced to place bets on GameStop and Peloton .
6. “The problem with gold coins, however, is that they will be worth only one-tenth of what they are today in 100 years or 50 years. The other problem is that I cannot move them around. It takes me three months and $5million to move $1Billion of gold from Tokyo to here. It is impossible to decompose and recompose.
7. “The whole world would switch to bitcoin and dollars if they could move them along crypto rails at light speed. Problem is that many people don’t know how to do this. Many people still don’t understand what bitcoin is. – It’s not easy to buy crypto.
8. “So, the main application of crypto is that it’s a savings account for people in cyberspace who don’t have the means or the desire to manage their own hedge funds.
9. “Bitcoin does not compete with the dollar.” It is not a currency. It’s not a currency.
10. “Cryptocurrency” is the most dangerous term because it’s not legal currency. Although “Crypto money” is an intellectual term that is not currency, most people confuse money with currency. This leads to cognitive traps. “Crypto property” is better.
11. “El Salvador is causing a lot of friction due to the way they characterize it as property and currency. They could have simply stated, “We’re going use the dollar to exchange and then we’re using bitcoin to store value.” You wouldn’t have any sparks if bitcoin was property and the dollar was currency.