MICHAEL SAYLOR ON THE BITCOIN CRASH
Today, for the bitcoin price, with no one else, but the one and only michael saylor. Finally, after 12 months talking on our channel, we have him back and we have juicy juicy and interesting things to discuss, not only in regards to price targets well, but also in regards to institutions some potential insider information why he is buying bitcoin at every single dip And much much more if you thought the last interview we made, which is the second most watched, mica sailor, video on the whole internet was worth watching. I can tell you the information in this video are definitely worth watching so watch this video until the very end smash up the like button. I leave michael sailor’s twitter profile down below if you’re, not following that one. What are you doing with your life and with that being said, i wanted to come to the by far most important question of today michael sailor.
How are you doing today? My man awesome happy to be here thanks for having me i’m happy to have you as well. I get nostalgic feelings. We talked like 12 months ago um before elon musk officially announced that he bought bitcoin. I still think, and probably you’re not gonna deny or approve.
I still think you did a very big part of actually getting him and tesla into bitcoin. You had a very big part, in my opinion, from the run of bitcoin from 30 000 to 60. 000 of many institutions getting in. We are very grateful for that, as we need this, of course, for mainstream adoption and for also bitcoin being recognized as legitimate store of value. So now, 12 months later, let’s reevaluate a little bit, and i wanted to ask you um.
Well, back in the days it was elon musk, i’m pretty sure it was you getting him into it. Who knows? Did you talk ever since then to other people of interest, maybe other important people who are now likely to get into bitcoin who at least got interested in it? Yeah it’s been a pretty communicative year. I mean i spent a lot of time talking with people that are interested in bitcoin.
I think it’s been a great 12 months. There’S been an extraordinary increase in interest amongst family offices, a lot of a lot of high net worth individuals that didn’t really know much about bitcoin it it all of a sudden, came onto their radar in 2021. A lot of private companies, i know a lot of uh, you know a lot of friends of mine and i make a lot of new friends now to run private companies and they’re all wondering what should they do with their treasury. I um i’ve been reached out to by a lot of public companies and and uh public investors as well. So i spent a lot of time talking with executives of large uh enterprises from all over the world.
I mean now you can zoom anywhere, so anybody in the world interested in bitcoin that wants to understand how to put it on a balance sheet. Oftentimes will want to talk with me um. I have a lot of uh a lot of engagement with public investors uh and uh. Sometimes it’s you know it’s just uh meetings to explain what we’re doing and why we do it. But you know: if you go on our website, you see we actually did a micro strategy, investors day and um.
Half of the discussion is our bitcoin strategy. We have lots and lots of people that show up and when we’re doing that, but also we post all those things online and – and they get many many many views, so i think uh. I think our job job is never done. If you think about it. Bitcoin really was uh was not on anybody’s radar; it was on one percent of the markets radar before march of 2020 and then by the end of 2020, it was like one and a half or two percent of people’s radar in 2021, it uh started moving on The radar of a lot more companies and and uh, like you know, you may have noticed uh goldman sachs, all of a sudden, is uh starting to decline.
Morgan and the coin city group is starting to cover bitcoin a lot more. A lot more uh information coming from the bulge bracket firms and uh, partly that’s because there are so many companies coming public that have a bitcoin interest. You know i think uh microstrategy was a on-ramp for a lot of public investors to get into bitcoin right. Our market cap was a bit more than a billion dollars before we got into bitcoin and none of our investors had any bitcoin exposure. You know our enterprise value increased to eight eight to ten billion dollars and, of course, that’s ten billion dollars worth of of institutional investors.
Holding bitcoin backed bonds converts our junk our junk bonds. Our senior secured debt is backed by bitcoin. Our converts are backed by bitcoin. We did 1.7 billion worth of converts all backed by bitcoin in hawaii or, let’s say, get back by bitcoin, but their bitcoin exposed people invested in them for the bitcoin upside and then all the common equity and so uh that’s uh.
It’S definitely a reason to talk to a lot of people, but microstrategy is just one company and i think, by the end of the first quarter of 2022, we’ll probably have two student bitcoin miners that are public, and so, if you, if you’re looking at at, maybe One of the most important trends of the past year and a half it’s the parade of bitcoin miners that are coming public and uh in the transition of uh small bitcoin miners that were trading on secondary stock markets like they were trading on the german exchanges or Or the the scandinavian exchanges or the london exchange and they’ve all and the canadian exchange and they’ve all been transitioning to the new york stock exchange and the nasdaq. And so, as you see, that trend of companies coming public companies switching their registration to the north american capital markets in the u.s capital markets that causes uh all of the large banks to wake up and all the large investors to wake up. And that, of course, brings them the coverage and when everybody’s doing that you know the question is: how should i think about this as a public company and so microstrategy, you know coming out early and making such a big commitment is, you know, has, has been able Uh to get a platform to communicate and i think that’s been instrumental yeah yeah. I i absolutely agree – and i personally i find it crazy, but in a good way, crazy.
This steve jobs, crazy that, like microstrategy at every single dip, sometimes like some purchases, were even much higher than now, but every single time, michael just tried, the price dips. Microstrategy comes out with an announcement, sometimes a little bit delayed that you bought even more. I think you have more than 100 in because you are also buying on debt now, of course, which um for the specific purpose of bitcoin. It really makes sense so now. My question is that almost on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, these announcements are coming out.
Is this ever going to stop, or are you going to accumulate bitcoin until you are owning them all? Um, of course that’s not possible, but please, let me know if there’s any end in sight or do you want a dollar cost average forever. As long as you are getting loans, as long as you are able to buy more and more, you know um our our initial purchase of bitcoin, i would character defensive when we bought the first 250 million, and then we did a dutch auction uh to see what Our investors would think, and the investors were pretty supportive and we ended up with another 175 million dollars and that became kind of opportunistic. We thought well, the investors are supportive, so we’ll do it then um we got toward the end of the year and and our stock price started moving up and it it moved to like a 10-year high and we had the ability to go back and raise uh Convertible debt – and we, you know, we started trying to raise 400 million dollars, but we upsized the deal the 650 million dollars and it was extraordinarily successful. We we raised 650 million dollars at a 75 basis, point rate and that and and bitcoin was like trading toward an all-time high there, like 18 or 19 000 a coin and people thought we were crazy, but you know our view was this is the future.
So we bought that bitcoin and now also, i think, opportunistic. I would characterize that when we got into february we um, we really reviewed our business strategy and we flipped from defensive to opportunistic and we realized this is now strategic right. This is a this. Is the strategy of the business we’re going to acquire digital property and bitcoin is the world’s greatest digital property like a property development company like if i moved to dubai, and i decided just to buy all the land in dubai or all the land i could buy? Or buy up all of manhattan um.
So if you look at our 10k right or our annual report, an annual report, a publicly traded company, it has to state what is its business strategy and then what are the risks associated with it? That’S part of the public company filing, so what you’ll see is in 2021. The big change for us is our business strategy, went from a single strategy to create and sell enterprise, business intelligence software worldwide to two strategies right and one was the enterprise software strategy, and the second was a bitcoin strategy, and the strategy is is very clearly enumerated. Our strategy is to acquire and to hold bitcoin. So the short answer, your question is: we’re going to keep buying bitcoin, forever, um and uh, and the reason why is because the amount of bitcoin coming on the market is exponentially falling and we know it’s asymptotically capped at 21 million.
We. We also know that the uh, the stock to flow rate has falling acid, is rising asymptotically or it’s it’s rising rapidly to infinity um, and it’s about to go negative right. The uh. You know it used to be the bitcoin miners when they were private, they were cash businesses and so, if you’re, a private operator operating, maybe in china, you’re you’re mining, bitcoin and you’re selling bitcoin to get hard cash. But then, when the markets developed, the public markets for bitcoin and the public markets for bitcoin mining stocks developed these businesses became well capitalized.
So if you look at uh, if you look at what’s happened the past 12 months, most of the of the bitcoin mining, has shifted from china to the north. America and these companies come public, so marathon and riot and hut 8, and you know, and argo and soon core scientifical be public via spec, um and uh. Just just this last week, uh bit farms announced they bought 1 000 bitcoin with cash, that’s 42 million dollars or worth of bitcoin okay they’re they’re. It’S a company buying bitcoin as fast as it is mining. Bitcoin marathon uh bought a bunch of bitcoin earlier in 2021, and and one thing that happened is all these publicly traded.
Bitcoin miners stopped selling their bitcoin right now now that, because, if you’re, a bitcoin miner you’re being valued based upon your ability, bitcoin right. So if you’re, a public company investor, if you were buying a bitcoin miner and you thought bitcoin – was going to go to zero, would you buy the miner? No? No! So all the public investors are long bitcoin.
They expect bitcoin to go up right. So what would you rather have a bitcoin miner that mines a lot of bitcoin or a little bitcoin? Well, a lot. Would you rather have a bitcoin miner that mines the bitcoin and sells it or the bitcoin miner that mines the bitcoin and keeps it you want to keep it and bitcoin? I would keep it, but it’s always important for me to decide whether to mine or not what is the what’s the cost of producing and how much bitcoin would i get in t0, putting the money instead of in mining equipment into bitcoin directly as its long-term, rising In value, energy cost might be increasing, so it’s it’s always a rough calculation right yeah.
So imagine. Bitcoin miners start to actually raise billions and billions of dollars in capital as credit and debt and debt offerings and equity. Now they can either buy the bitcoin mining rigs or they can buy the bitcoin. Well, one thing that they’re: they can’t really spend all that money on bitcoin mining rigs, there’s a limit to how much capacity they can buy and when they can bring it online. I think we’re getting sold out.
It seems to me, like those mining rigs, the lead times are becoming a year or year and a half so as as they get better capitalized that excess capital uh converts into not selling bitcoin and then, when they get even better cap by success, capital becomes. I’M not sell bitcoin, but i’m also going to accumulate bitcoin. Okay. So now the stock to flow starts to switch from a stock to flow of 50 to a stock, to flow of 100 to a stock to flow of 200. And then, if at some point, the stock to flow goes to infinity.
And then the stock to flow goes because the miners don’t necessarily dump any bitcoin on the market, to sell they’re, actually mining it to keep as an investment and then they’re buying access bitcoin, because it’s creative to their to their balance sheet is secretive to their to Their uh stock, it’s so this is a a pretty powerful trend. In fact, i think i think we saw riot raise 600 million dollars of equity in the fourth quarter and we saw marathon do a 650 million dollar convertible debt deal in the fourth quarter, and we know that uh other companies. You know that i one in particular. I think raised another 400 million, so three companies raised one and a half billion dollars. Just three companies.
If you look across the 24, publicly traded ones, it’s a lot more. But if you look across the 24, publicly traded ones and the big 25 private ones, you can see that billions and billions of dollars of capital via private equity, debt, public equity and uh credit lines are flowing to the miners and all the miners have naturally long Investors that are long bitcoin, so what you? What you have there, is this very unique situation. Maybe in the history of the world, we’ve never had a circumstance where the producers of the product we’re producing a scarcity like gold miners are producing a commodity. Silver is a commodity, copper is a commodity.
You know. Glass and steel are commodities right, there’s, there’s an unlimited amount, so the the natural reaction or the natural, rational behavior of all those companies is to produce as much as possible and sell it as fast as they can, but with bitcoin, because we’re right now to bitcoin The rational behavior is to produce as much as possible, but to sell as little as you can and if you sell it fast, your equity is worth less and if you produce it and hold it, your equity is worth more. So if your equity is worth more, you can raise more capital, and if you raise more capital, you can buy more rather than sell more, and so what happens is the well-capitalized miners also um? They are also the least likely to sell. So if you’re not well capitalized, what are you going to do you either have to go public or you’re, going to sell your company to a public miner, and, and did you notice that marathon just bought a huge amount of uh mining rigs from bitmain, like a Billion dollars worth or something a lot dude check out the press release it’s like a massive amount.
I think they’ve uh announced that they’re headed toward 23 tera 23 exahash by the middle of 2023. Okay. So what does that mean they’re from because well because marathon’s the high bidder like? If, if someone offered you a billion dollar order right and no one else did would you take? The money depends on what i could do.
Who’S who’s got more money, who’s got, the who’s got the money to out-bid marathon in the bitcoin mining business. Nobody, nobody see yeah. So what happens? Is the public companies get the largest market cap and then they buy up all the mining rigs? Now, if you’re a miner in asia, you can’t buy any money.
So what happens to the hash power? The hash power moves to north america. So if the hash power is moving in north america, what are the investors and bitcoin miners move to north america? So who wins north american miners? What do they do?
Well, the mining rigs and block everybody else out of the market? Okay, fine! Then? What do they do? They buy up all the miners in the rest of the world, then what happens?
Well, the public investors stock, they’re gon na see all the bitcoin rewards right then, what happens they raise more money? What happens they? They can’t buy any more mining rigs, so what they do is they stop? Selling bitcoin they’ve already seen that right. If you look at the top 20 bitcoin miners, you see that they’re they’re huddling their bitcoin.
So then what happens after they stop selling their bitcoin price of bitcoin starts to go up that happens. Well then, you start buying the bitcoin, so i mean imagine if a gold miner said oh yeah, we just uh raised a billion dollars and we bought goal with it. Well, they’re not going to do that, because gold’s not scarce, just see gold’s, not sk. For two reasons: it’s not scarce at the metallic level, but it’s also not scarce at the derivative level. Right you can.
You can just print too many gold derivatives, so bitcoin’s a much better idea, and i think i think the thing that’s underestimated. It’S underappreciated and there is like a a one to three year. Delay is the the impact of all the publicly traded companies that are mining. Bitcoin right, if you look at them right, i think uh bitcoin mining revenue is like at the current price, it’d be like 14 billion a year, maybe okay! So what hap?
If the publicly uh the publicly traded bitcoin miners are able to raise 14 billion dollars in capital in the year 2022, The price increases significantly, it’s not just like, because a billion dollar in buy volume of course increases the market cap by way more than a billion, so 14 billion would be significant for the price. Very, very significant. You have two dynamics right. I mean first of all of the 14 billion the gross margin on that 70. 75 percent yeah.
So if they mine 14 billion they’ve got a 10 billion dollar profit. Well, what are you going to do with it you’re going to invest that in bitcoin, because you’re long bitcoin, so you’ve got 10 billion dollars that might flow his profit that gets reinvested and then, if you raise another 10 billion right, you’ve got what do you? What can you invest that in well, you know you’re going to lock up the mining rigs and then you’re going to buy so we’re talking about um we’re talking about a very material impact on the supply of bitcoin flowing in the market, and i think the logical Conclusion is sometime in the next 12 to 36 months. The miners are a net buyer of bitcoin they’re, not really sell bitcoin and uh, and that’s a it’s a positive feedback loop right, because the miner that uh accumulates the most bitcoin generates the highest market cap and has the most power to accumulate more bitcoin. So the game theory says that if you’re the minor number two, don’t you want to copy that and mine are number three and when you get to minor number 27, if you can’t copy that you’re gon na sell out to minor number two you see, and so The industry will uh consolidate, come public, go west, strengthen and um, and the capital flows that are interesting here are um, not just the trading and the spot market of bitcoin or trading in the derivatives of bitcoin.
I mean it used to be, it was spot bitcoin. Then it was derivatives of bitcoin. Now it’s uh regulated derivatives exchange like the cme but check out the side, markets check out the market in trading and um marathon and riot and beto and mstr. And if you look at the amounts like uh like we can we can do it even right now, like uh just for kicks. If i go uh here to my screen, like even in the first hour, can i share the screen?
Uh. No i’ll, just tell you. Okay, in the first hour um it’s uh, it’s like 90 million dollars of uh marathon stock has been traded in one hour, um, 60, 60, 70 million dollars. No, no! It’S about 35 million dollars of riot stock has been traded in one hour.
The beat the beto etf has about 50 million dollars traded in one hour. Microstrategy is a 50 million is traded in one hour. So you see where i’m getting at that. There are very large markets that are uh, that are derivatives of bitcoin that are getting trading and that’s and that’s capital market support for that, and, ultimately those markets, um they’re, supporting bitcoin itself. You see when you get to the point where you have 30 40 50 companies that are trading with billion dollar, multi-billion dollar market caps, then, and all those are maturing and stabilizing the industry, and this is a dynamic that really is a big advantage to um to Bitcoin versus any other commodities, business or any other store of value, and it’s also it’s also state it’s a differentiator of bitcoin versus other cryptos right you in order to take a company public, you kind of need a proof-of-work mining network.
You need a company in texas that does stuff right. You, you can’t very easily take public a staking network because uh stakes are probably securities and and it’s a much more complicated thing. It starts to look like a mutual fund, whereas miners are operating companies and operating companies. Uh can get capitalized in the private market and the public market, and so you think of them as the bridge between uh traditional mainstream capital and uh crypto economy and uh. It’S it’s important to stabilize uh bitcoin with all these bitcoin derivatives, but it’s also important to stabilize it politically, because you know the governor of texas now has a bunch of companies in texas that are paying taxes in texas, they’re, employing people in texas that are buying Energy in texas that are good corporate citizens in texas.
That’S an industry just like it makes an industry in el salvador industry in canada and industry and in new york and uh, and the creation of these industries. They they recruit, support and and and uh people. Uh people are much. You know how they support the soccer team from their home town because it’s in their home stadium they play in my home stadium, i’m very loyal. People are loyal to the home team and so bitcoin miners, they’re kind of the home team and uh and that they will recruit the mayors, the governors they recruit, the investment banks.
Right i mean when uh, when marathon sells a 650 million dollar convertible deal. The investment bank sold it and got and got paid to do, and then there are investors on the other side that bought it. So what we’re doing is we’re sharing the good fortune spreading the wealth around and it’s decentralizing the network more right and all of those are good things, and every single company is working very aggressively all the time to decentralize the network right. Fine. I i want to find uh new political jurisdictions i want to.
I want to recruit energy companies, nuclear power companies, the urcot grid. You know geothermal companies, i want to recruit in countries. I want to recruit new institutional investors. I want to recruit new investment bankers and, of course, when you’ve done all that, then the media wants to cover it right, because cnbc now has 20 or 30 publicly traded, tickers and you’ve heard that phrase interested i’m not interested. In this thing, the word interest, classically understood, means i have a financial interest in this story.
So when the wall street journal writes a story about a ticker, you know r, i o t or m a r a if the ticker is there. That means that there’s a built-in audience that will want to read that story. They are interested. They don’t write stories about private companies very often, because if i write a story about a private company, who’s got an interest in it. Nobody can can you buy it?
No, can you sell it? No can you trade that, can you can you trade the options on it? No, if i can’t bet on it, i’m not so caring about it right. I mean, i think, that’s why i have a youtube channel about bitcoin yeah, because it’s changing all the time right, like uh, for example, uh. Even if you hate like write a story about like such and such you know such and such bitcoin miner is really poorly run and stupid.
Well, i can go and short the stock. I can bet against it right this quarter. Oh, i read that tom brady’s arm is sore this week. I can bet on the game, and so it becomes newsworthy and uh, and if you want to capture the interest of bloomberg and cnbc right and wall street journal, right and and every other financial writer, you have to give them something interesting. And that means public tickers.
Right, that’s why you know best things matter, because we still have a world where you know 99 of the money is in the traditional economy, and that means 99 percent of the political support 99 of the media. Interest 99 of the of the financial banking systems, and so the crossover, the crossover is, the etfs. The crossover is companies like microstrategy. The crossover is the bitcoin miners right. That crossover creates a bridge between the old and the new and uh and it and it provides a smooth, uh graceful transition.
I mean, if i know graceful is not a word we use. We describe crypto very often right. It’S not nothing graceful about it sometimes, but it would be. It would be much worse right and even harder if you didn’t have those public companies that are are intermingling their balance sheets with uh, bitcoin and and by inference the crypto economy yeah. I i definitely agree and um i see also microstrategy being something like a link between the traditional world and bitcoin people have to understand.
Bitcoin is the only asset i can think of like. I would even leave out time as as an asset if you wanted to which is absolutely scarce right. I think you mentioned it one time. Well, let’s say there is a billion dollar investment going into gold, uh mining. Then, of course more gold is mine.
Maybe it’s gon na be made more efficiently, maybe in the future we can mine it on asteroids. You don’t really know. What’S the maximum supply, if you put more money into gold mining, more gold is being mined effectively right. But if you put more money into bitcoin mining, the network gets more secure and now think about. We have a few.
You mentioned a few names, a few very, very big companies already involved in bitcoin. Let it be mining, let it be investing, but in the end of the day we have like seven, eight thousand billion dollar institutions or billion dollar nc entities or pers uh people worth at least a billion dollars like of them, maybe two percent or so on exposed. So we potentially have still 98 of them who have to be exposed and we have 40 million millionaires. We have basically 98.2 of the world’s population not involved in bitcoin and where we usually have demand and supply when the demand goes up.
Well, people produce more. So you have demand supply and the price regulating the whole mechanism. In this case we have demand a fixed supply and the price. Well, when the, when the demand increases the supply can’t increase, the price is the only regulating mechanism, and i really hope that the people understand that especially – and that’s where my next question comes into place, uh in times like this, where people are questioning well, are we Going into a bear market, the bitcoin price is basically going sideways for a year wow i mean we are like for 12 years, just going up with a few breaks. So now that is my next question actually and number one.
Do you think we are in a bear market right now and number two something i was interested in? There are a few different theories. You probably know the four year cycle, theory and there’s also another theory about lengthening cycles, and even though you are of course, a long-term investor price will be to a certain degree in the short and midterm also interesting to you. So i really would like to know um. Do you think we are in a bear market right now?
Do you actually think this is just the beginning of a much bigger run towards the upside in the mid run, let’s say, and what do you think about the four year cycle theory and the lengthening cycles? Well, um, i think we’re in a consolidating plateau and uh. It’S a it’s uh. I think it’s a pretty good plateau because there’s all these there are all these conventional mainstream investors and uh they’ve been watching bitcoin and when bitcoin was going up too fast when running parabolic, they’re afraid to uh to buy in, but right now sitting in a plateau Where they, you know, they’re a lot more likely to buy it by the way. If the return looks back and the return was 5x.
The nasdaq we’ve got some really great news. This week, uh mueller came out and he announced that half of his personal net worth half of his personal portfolio was invested in bitcoin and he you know he said the other half was like an amazon he’s held amazon for 25 years or whatever, and you know Amazon is famously volatile, it went through lots and lots of 80 downs and a 90 draw down and he’s just been sitting forever he’s like a classic hodler and amazon’s big tech. In essence, what he said was i own digital gold and i own a big tech retailer and i’m and that’s half and half now he had a year ago. He said i have some, but he never said 50 percent now you’ve got all the other mainstream investors that have some gold exposure. You know the paul tudor jones and the stanley druckenmillers and the ray dalios and the you know, fill in the blank and they’re all starting to wake up to this, and when they see bill miller, who’s uh, you know, runs multiple billions of dollars and is a Billionaire in his own right, saying saying: this is the only thing i can find that can go up by a factor of 10 to 50 That um, that also is a, is a store of value asset right.
Then then they start to pay attention now, if bitcoin was trading at an all-time high and it was like on fire they’d be afraid. But you kind of like the idea that bitcoin is 40 off the all-time high and it’s catching its breath and you think maybe there’s an entry point and in fact i’ve seen lots of high net worth individuals and family offices that they’re just now starting to do An allocation to bitcoin like maybe we should allocate five percent or we should alloc two and a half percent. You know and uh you know february they would have been or march or april or may they’d be afraid and and now it you know, they’re through a lot of the risk. You know the china crack down, de-risked the situation, the um, the consolidations diversity and uh. The situation, every single, publicly traded miner, every every miner that comes public.
Do you risk the situation? Uh, all the political uh, the regulatory clarity is de-risking the situation, and so i i don’t think we’re in a bear market. I think i think bitcoin is it’s moving. Um through this phase, uh, where it you know, it moved from 4, 000 to 40 000 with volatility, and it’s going to move from 4 000 to 500 000. I mean the next plateau.
Is the gold plateau right to? Basically, digital gold replaces gold and flips gold and that’s like a five thousand five hundred thousand dollar number, i think and then um and then then, after that, it’s really just a property index or a monetary index, which should be 10x that so you know what i See is uh is a move from where we are to 500 000 over three four five years and then over the following three to five years. You know it could take, could take 10 years, but but a move in the next. The next epic, from the 500 000 to 5 million dollar range, because ultimately people say what is what is bitcoin well bitcoin is the apex proper, the human race? It’S the only property, you can truly own.
So the question is: who wants it? Well, everybody in the world with weaker property. So what is weaker property? Well? How about like a second house in africa like how about land in the middle of of of africa or asia or or south america?
How about a building and fill in the blank? Would you rather own a building and in venezuela or argentina how about a ranch in colombia like everywhere in the world where you have excess money and you want to invest in property? The problem with investing in a currency derivative is the currencies, are collapsing right and they’re they’re collapsing at 10 15 a year in the western world, but they’re collapsing at 40, 50 60 a year in the developing world, so so bonds, they’re weak property, uh real estate Is weak property because you’ve got a politician that can to you know they’re going to tax it and they can take it away from you and you can’t move it if you need to leave and you can only rent it to people in the country so and Then equities are weak property because uh, because the ceo controls that equity they control it’s a security and if you own securities, the bank, the bank controls it. Let’S say you own a security. You live in zimbabwe while the government of zimbabwe can take it away from you.
Try buying it at jp morgan, they can take it away from you. The ceo can print more equity and they can take it away from you. A random government. You know in australia can put a fine on google and they can take it away from you. A union can unionize right.
So, if you’re holding, if you’re holding securities you’ve got lots of risk. If you’re holding real estate, you’ve got lots of risk if you’re holding gold well, the bankers can print more gold paper and the gold miners can mine more gold and try to move through an airport with 10 million dollars of gold or try to move through an Airport, with 10 000 of gold trying to move to an airport with a thousand dollars a gold, i tried to move to an airport with a uh, a pen knife that amazon told me and it was labeled as tsa friendly. I couldn’t get a knife: that’s like a quarter inch or half inch blade through a metal detector in an airport, so your property is all weak all of it, and so how much is weak hundreds of trillions of dollars of weak property. So, ultimately, i think that there are eight billion people on the planet or there shortly will be eight billion people on the planet and they’re all going to want uh some amount of digital property, instead of like that second airbnb, or that investment property or that equity. I even finally you know i even did a little survey on twitter where, where um cash out, but you um they, let you decide whether or not you wanted to give someone the gift of a stock or the gift of bitcoin or the gift of cash.
For christmas and uh, i actually put in a survey, i said: what do you want to give away uh? You know cash stock, you know equity or bitcoin. It’S like you know: 93 bitcoin 7 stock, like that is to say everybody intuitively understands that equity or securities are risky and that and that bitcoin is property, and so it’s like a 20 to one 10 10 to one or 20 preference, if they, if they need To own something – and so i think, michael, your audience is over proportionally smart also, you have a big bitcoin audience, but i agree that this will be representative, probably for the population in a few years. Otherwise i wouldn’t be sitting here um. I i think it’s impressive results for sure yeah yeah, like you’re right uh, you have to be educated among the educated.
There is an overwhelming preference for property, and i mean it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if i offered you a million dollars of prop of real estate property in africa or a million dollars worth of stocks of african companies or a million dollars Worth of gold in africa or a million dollars worth of bitcoin in africa, which of those four would an educated person choose, i would take bitcoin because it leaves me all the options to reinvest hold, sell, move everything. So that means that you know you and i we have our work cut out first for the next decade, because this is going to be a decade of education right i mean because a lot of people don’t understand digital property yet and they don’t understand, but but And that’s the only reason they don’t want it. If you were to go to you know most people in the world and you say you know, go to lebanon or go to turkey and you say well uh, you know the turkish lira is crashing. The lebanese pound is crashing. What do you want?
Well, there’s a small group of people who say i’m going to stick with the local currency, because i’m a patriot and because my political leader told me to invest everything in that there’s a large group of people. That say, i think i want to switch that to digital dollars like like. They know they want dollars. They know they want a dollar rather than you know, local lebanese pound. I there’s a larger group, i mean.
Maybe 20 percent of patriots, 50 60 70 are going to take the currency and then the last 10 20 30 they’re going to take the bitcoin because they know the pro that bitcoin is even stronger than the currency. But that’s the dynamic that’s spreading right now, except every single day. People are getting smarter information is spreading right. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and so when you, when you look at you know what is my thesis for bitcoin over the long term, my thesis is technology, will advance everybody’s smartphones are going to get more powerful, wouldn’t get to a world where, Eventually, you know google and facebook and apple they’re, going to also support this digital property and digital currency. That’S billions of people, twitter is going to spread, youtube is going to spread, knowledge is going to spread and, i suppose, even 20 years from now there will probably be some kind of ignorant.
You know patriots that are ideologues. That’Ll say i reject all new things and i’m going to just do whatever i’m told, but it’s going to get to be an increasingly small portion of the population and and by the way they’re not going to they’re, not they’re, going to lose their money right, like The point is they’re going to lose their money, the money is going to move to the wise, and so this the smarter part of the population is going to get richer. The wealth is going to transfer and that’s going to create a a strong dynamic. So you know the bitcoin path is clear: we’re not the the concept of bear market only makes sense if you have a short enough time horizon like if you’re a trader and your time horizon is 12 weeks. You can have a bear market but uh.
If you have a 10-year time horizon, then you really have to ask yourself what is the technology trend and what is the cultural trend and uh, and the technology trend is clear: we’re moving toward everybody on earth having a digital wallet that they can move digital assets Around that’s clear and cultural trend is people are globalizing so again like if you, if you’re sitting in the middle of the serengeti and someone offers you the chance to buy a million dollars worth of ranch land in a country where you don’t trust the government, like It used to be, you didn’t, have a choice. 20 years ago you had to take the local currency and you had to own the local land, but 20 years from now, you can use a foreign currency. Like i mean, the truth is just about, everybody would switch to the dollar tomorrow if they could, and they would swap no one’s going to use the peso the bolivar, the niara, the pound, whatever they would all switch tomorrow. If they had technology that was safe, if they could figure out how to do it, so we’re globalizing we’re using like language like english, like we’re globalizing our language, we’re globalizing, our currency, we’re globalizing our property. It’S moving on digital rails, uh that that creates an advantage for the early adopters there’s going to be volatility, but you know like if you bought amazon stock 10 years ago.
You know you could have bought it for 250. A share people just said: you’re stupid. You know, and if you were holding amazon stock 20 years ago, it traded down 90 percent right. Well, the you know the world’s second richest or richest man was stupid enough not to sell when it traded down 90 percent right, that’s the key. I mean when facebook came public, the stock traded down 60 or something you know it crashed and mark zuckerberg did himself, and so i mean the real secret to success.
Is you figure out the technology trend over a decade over between 10 and 30 years, and then you just either make that asset or hold that asset? And you don’t really obsess over short-term cycles, because you outsmart yourself right you’re, like you’ll, be that guy that you know you’ll be convinced, we’re in a bear cycle, you’ll sell and then all of a sudden, some piece of news will come out. The price will double and you’ll never get back in and it will you know it’s like it’ll it’ll run away from you, so i i don’t think anybody’s smart enough to time the market yeah. I i really agree. Actually, usually what i do in life is.
I try to learn as much from mistakes from other people, so i asked a few ogs in the space when i joined later on within the last few years. What was your biggest mistake? What was your biggest regret, or what would you do differently and every single one of them said buying high selling low other way around buying altcoins investing here investing they are going back to us dollar. Eventually, everyone who is in this space for at least five years would have done the best by just buying and holding and just doing nothing, and i really hope that most of the people watching this year are going to understand that uh. If you don’t want to believe me, just ask anyone who is in this space for more than five years, and he will probably agree with that um.
I just wanted to put a few things to set here together, because i want to make sure that people are taking this away. First of all, we mentioned the price target of gold, which would, if you put it over into the market cap of gold over which is, like i don’t know, 9 trillion or something over to bitcoin or 10 trillion. And then we would have a price of 50 or 500 000 us dollars per bitcoin if it would be on par with gold. So you said this should happen within the next three to six years. So let’s say best case three years, then another three to six years to ten times that right, if we are going from the store value um into other regions, so you would say your best case scenario for a five million dollar.
Bitcoin would be best case scenario. Speculative of course, uh would be 2028. Is that correct yeah? I don’t think i don’t that’s the best cage, but i don’t think it’ll go that fast, but i think over a decade it’s reasonable yeah, like you, you said like six to ten years, right of course and um once again. What is ten years, if you can hundred times your money, uh people really forget about that, and in the end of the day, do you really want to make every day 10 20 hours research?
What outcome to invest in? Do you really want to buy high sell or when you can have almost certainty, 400x right? That is something that people have to ask themselves. So thank you very much for this outlook. That was uh, definitely a very, very interesting one um that is actually already it for today.
I would love to get maybe back to another interview, not in the next, not after 12 months, maybe in the next few months again. I hope i get a little bit more of your time. Of course, whatever you want to share here towards the end, i would love to to have some last words for you to the audience you know um. If i look at the course of my life and look at investment wisdom, i’m i’m reminded of a few things. One warren buffett said: if you wouldn’t hold that thing for 10 years, you shouldn’t hold it for 10 minutes.
So if you start with this, just warren buffett idea find high quality property high quality assets that you believe in and if you’re not sure for 10 years. Instead of investing in it, you probably should invest in learning more about it right study, something long enough right, but google, facebook, apple, amazon, microsoft, bitcoin study, something long enough that you believe in it and uh and then, when you buy it, buy it with a 10-year Idea and to be thinking, i’m gon na just hold this investment. I’M gon na hold this asset for a decade by the same is true with the house. If i bought a house, i wouldn’t buy a house that i expected to sell in three years or two years. If you don’t think you can live the rest of your life in that house, good rent, i mean when, when you buy a property, if you buy a truck, if you buy a piece of art, you know buy something that you love.
You know uh that you’re going to be committed to for a long period of time, because that’s a higher test and i think when people buy stuff and they’re like well, i know it’s got bugs and i know there are problems, but i’m not going to keep It that long right, what you’ve done, is you’ve lowered your standards when you buy your dream home and you say i’m going to retire here and live here. The rest of my life. You don’t live in fear that you have to find some other sucker to sell it to you know, because you don’t have to sell it because you bought it because you’re committed to it you’re married to it. So i think that i think that uh, that buffett sets a good example there. He bought coca-cola stock 50 years ago or something he still holds – coca-cola stuff and um.
I mean, i think, uh when you raise the bar to that standard. It makes things a lot easier it. What it says is you’re going to be you’re, going to you’re going to make a decision they’re going to make an allocation, and then you’re not going to stress out every day every minute. Every week, every month staring at the price like if, if you went every dinner party, if you went out and you got drunk and then you met everybody and you said hey, i want to show you my house. How much will you give me for it?
Now people get, you know you paid whatever 500 000 euros for it and someone’s like i’ll, give you 400 000 euros, you’d be so depressed. How much would you give me for it i’ll give you 600 thousand you’re ecstatic, and then you know two in the morning and you’re really drunk how much and then you find someone who’s even drunker than you. How much will you give me for it? 300. 000.
Now you’re really now i’m gon na slit my wrist, it’s because you’re continually over indulging in this exercise. If you just said this is my beautiful house, i love it. I’M gon na live in the rest of my life. You know, then, then it’s a totally different situation. If i look at all the mistakes that that i made, the mistakes are are generally just about.
Every investment i ever made was a good one, because i only bought good things. All my mistakes are. I wish i bought more, and my second mistake is: i’m i’m sad that i ever sold it for any reason. You’Re not doing this mistake anymore, you’re buying so many babies right now, michael to figure it out. Once you figure out what you love, then you buy it and then your question really is well.
If i’m gon na sell it what’s better than what i’m than what i’m already holding and that’s what i would ask anybody, that’s selling bitcoin right now! That’S what i was asking when it was 10 000, a coin. I said: who are these people selling this to me like? What could they possibly be buying with the money i’m giving them that’s better than what i’m buying from them, and the same is true. You’Ve got to network bitcoin, it’s pretty obvious that the world appreciates it.
It’S common property, it’s acknowledged by everybody in the world, is a as a dominant digital network. We know there’s more inflation coming, we know the technology’s advancing. We know that people like being able to put things on their smartphones yep. So if you believe in technology, if you believe you know, if you believe in the future of assets, like the only reason you would ever sell a high quality piece of property – is to buy something higher quality right. You know everyone that’s successful in life.
They don’t get successful by trading rapidly. In and out i mean bill gates, steve ballmer, elon, musk, mark zuckerberg, jeff, bezos they’re, not trading in and out of their property right, they’re buying property, they’re holding it for 30 years right, and so i think that uh just figure out what you love. If you’re not sure what you love do more research, when you, when you’ve done the research, the you know, warren buffett said one other thing he said the ideal holding company is the the ideal. Holding period is forever right. That’S the way you should think if you’re, if you’re a wise investor, buy something that you can give to your children’s children yeah and if you think that way, there’s a higher hurdle right look, maybe maybe you want to speculate, and maybe you want to gamble, or Maybe you want to invest, okay well, so take a portion of your assets that you invest for the long term and you allocate that to the highest quality property you can find, which i think is bitcoin, but you can decide and the other portion is investment risk And you’re going to actually that facebook might be peloton this quarter, but that you’re taking a risk and then maybe some is venture capital.
You invest in private companies, that’s a much, that’s a 10x bigger risk and then maybe some is speculation and you gamble with that and that’s a hundred x greater risk as long as there’s those four buckets the irrational. Then okay do that but be rational about it and uh. You know. If you really want to be successful, they’re really successful investors, they picked something they committed to it and they stayed with it and they’re unshakeable in their conviction, because the world will generate 10 000 anxiety-inducing headlines over the course of the next 10 years and every one Of them will be calculated to get your attention by creating maximum anxiety and there’s only one mistake you can make, which is to sell. That’S the one mistake and then everybody in the universe is going to try to get you to sell, because if they don’t create anxiety, right, inflammation or enragement is engagement right.
If they don’t create the anxiety, you won’t read the story, it’s click bait. You know. Sometimes people post stories about me on youtube and they say michael saylor, said: he’ll sell his bitcoin when this happens and i go whoa and then i want to click on it. I’M like wait a minute. I am michael saylor and i know i’m not selling my bitcoin.
They still got me to click on it. It’S that good, the in the media is, is engaged in. Getting you to react and there’s only one mistake when you’ve made the right decision when you when you your life, is set, you’ve got the perfect house and the perfect family and the perfect assets and the perfect property. The only mistake is get panicked out of your position, so don’t panic, yeah, there’s, there’s even a website, counting all the panic headlines about bitcoin that bitcoin is dead. It happened over and over again.
They said it in 2012, 13. 14. 15. It’S like happening over and over again um. I think you bought a lot of very important and valuable life.
Lessons to the table. Everyone. You can educate yourself for free andreas antonopoulos, videos free on the internet, a lot of nice uh interviews with michael sailor. You can just check on chain since 11 years address is increasing entities increasing um, i mean it. It’S it’s insane.
The hash rate increasing like without any breaks like all the on-chain data, is all pointing towards the same direction. The price is down 40 from the all-time high. Perfect fundamentals are higher right now the price is down. If you go to a shop, you want to buy a pair of shoes, it’s expensive! You go back the next day, it’s at a 40 discount.
The shoe is the exact same. Are you going to say? Oh i’m not gon na buy it it’s 40 cheaper. It doesn’t make any sense. Guys, honestly, like just make your own research, invest at your own risk once you did that and you like bitcoin, buy bitcoin hold it.
Don’T do anything else so with that being said, thank you very much for that. I just had one question in my: in the back of my mind, i forgot to ask you um. I probably i think i know the answer already, but for all the people watching right now. I know there are a lot of ethereum uh fanatics out there. I myself having 15 in ethereum.
Almost everything else is in bitcoin, of course, besides my own project, but like if you exclude that i have 80 in bitcoin, so i wanted to know from you: um are you holding any ethereum like even a dollar, and if not, would you consider in the future, At any time, in the future owning ethereum, a hundred percent of my uh crypto assets are bitcoin and uh the. Why is because it’s universally acknowledged that bitcoin is property, that is it is. It was a it’s a fair uh, distribution and, and it has none of the aspects of a security right, satoshi disappeared, the coins never moved for a year, they traded without a price. It was a project uh and, and it was a project without uh, any characteristics of investment contract. So i, if you look at the entire crypto ecosystem, all the uncertainty, all the regulatory uncertainty and and the question marks – are around uh securities right, uh, stable coins or securities lots of tokens of securities.
If there’s an ico, if there’s a central organization, if there’s a pre mine, if there’s any kind of, if there’s a foundation that has uh treasury, if there are executive decisions, if there are lots of hard forks that are happening every quarter every six months, that starts To look more like a security in the eyes of a regulator and i’m not i’m not your lawyer, so i’m not here to give you legal opinions one way or the other, but what i would say is i am a hundred percent certain that bitcoin is property And that means it’s common property to the world and i i don’t know the status of everything else. If something is property, it means that it is ethical and it is legal for a mayor, a governor, a senator, a congressman, a public official to promote it. Like chris, if you were to ask me right now, do you have a price prediction for micro stock? I would say: no that’s a security, i’m not going to give you an opinion about a security. If you were to ask me for an opinion about any company facebook, amazon apple, i would say that’s a security.
I would have civil liability right, it’s governed by the sec. I don’t wish to opine on it one way or the other right. If you would ask me about bitcoin, i will look you in the face and say: bitcoin is going up forever. It’S good everybody should own it. You see, you understand, there’s a there’s, a there’s, a safe harbor and there’s a clarity around bitcoin, because it is property when other things reach that degree of clarity.
If if there were other cryptos that were universally acknowledged as property, then then they’re something you could consider investing in, i don’t have a problem holding property, i would hold land, i would you know, i don’t have a problem promoting. I think you should buy your beach house. I think you should buy your second home. I don’t have a problem with that, but i’ll never give you any investment advice about a security, a private company, a public company, a crypto token uh, because that crosses this boundary. You know, and i and i don’t know like i right i just i i think you got to know your limitations and so so i’m hyper conservative in that regard as a public company officer and because i’ve been a publicly traded company for 22 years – and you Know i’m everything i do like if you, if you go and you look at our quarterly results, read them or read my 10k.
It has like pages and pages of risk factors in it. Full disclosure. When you have a security, you have an ethical obligation to give comprehensive disclosure about everything you uh everything you’ve done everything you’re thinking about doing and even then you worry right, and so i i like bitcoin, because it’s property and and you don’t have that issue – i’m Not ready and uh uh, it’s just not appropriate uh to go into the other uh crypto areas, because we’re gon na have three to five years of regulatory. Clarity where whereby i’m paid 30 jurisdictions are going to be working through how they feel about every single token – and i don’t know you can make money no doubt, but i i classified is as it’s like technology venture capital. It’S it’s an it’s either an investment like.
If you said it’s guaranteed, it’s it’s just as safe as apple. Then it’s an investment, but you know i wouldn’t uh. I wouldn’t recommend apple stock. You know it is an investment, even though it’s publicly traded an investment, or it’s like in this uh private zone, where it’s like vc, like uh, venture capital. It’S like it’s much riskier and there’s a much greater failure rate.
I mean the odds are not 95 percent likely. That apple goes out of business in a decade the odds are 95 likely that private companies go out of business in a decade or more. So no, i wouldn’t do that and what’s the speculation like you asked me about shib versus doge voices versus another dog coin. It’S like, like you, can make lots of money if you did great good for you, but it’s like you know, i’m not gon na recommend which football team you get. You know you bet on for the super bowl.
I i just don’t know, that’s not what i’m here for and, and i couldn’t in good conscience, uh make uh. You know a decent recommendation. I’D stand by yeah. No, i i understand – and i think history so far, even if it was only like a history of 15 months or whatever it, it proved you right, uh, already and um. I think we just talked about a potential 100x for bitcoin, who is asking for even more than that.
If this is now almost a certainty, maybe that we that’s something we can say who wants a 200x or 300x with like so much more risk involved? If you lose a 50 percent, you have to make 100 to get it back. If you lose 80 percent, you have to make five extra money to make it back, so just go with risk minimalization and i think bitcoin should be the best deal. That’S why i’m also exposed 80 in it um actually of my net worth so to speak anyways. Thank you very much.
That was insightful. Awesome, awesome interview, unfortunately not in my uh usual setup, I’m traveling myself, but i truly appreciate the time you put in um. Actually, what the people don’t know who are watching this? I already let you down on the 23rd of December, because i was so busy. Thank you so much for your understanding for coming back, and i hopefully see you very soon at the next one yeah thanks for having me, i always enjoy our conversations perfect.
Thank you and everyone watching like follow Michael share. The video do something good and spread. The word thank you. Bye,
via MICHAEL SAYLOR ON THE BITCOIN CRASH
