PBD Podcast | EP 128 | Patron Saint of Bitcoin: Michael Saylor

I can hold possession of a billion-dollars of Bitcoin in my head just holding a password or set of private keys ... The first time in the history of the human race that you can actually take possession of your wealth and take it to the grave with you or take it anywhere else on Earth with you. And even if I put a gun to your head, the most I can do is kill you; I can't take it.

The reason that Bitcoin is magical is because there's only 21 million. I can create more real estate in New York City. I can create more cars. I can create more luxury watches. I can create more gold. I can create more shares of stock. I can create more bonds. I can create any commodity ... Given enough money and time, I can create infinite of any of them. Bitcoin is a scarcity. Name another scarcity in the world. Technically, it's not clear there is another scarcity.

Bitcoin is a nuclear-hardened protocol. It's pretty much the most robust, resilient thing the human race has yet to invent ... If all of the electricity got shut off everywhere on Earth and every computer failed everywhere on Earth for 10 years, the protocol just goes dormant for 10 years, and as soon as one person turns one node back on, the entire protocol comes back to life again.

The fundamental difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is Ethereum's monetary policy changes every six months ... There's a difficulty bomb in Ethereum that's been getting pushed back since 2016. They keep pushing it back. When it goes off, it will wipe out, obliterate, a $50B Ethereum mining industry—just wipe it out, completely change the protocol, flip everything to proof-of-stake. They keep putting it off. That sounds like a group of people exercising influence over the protocol.

The whole idea of Bitcoin is it's perfected engineered gold, crypto gold, with none of the defects of gold. You can't mine anymore of it, it's weightless, I can move it at the speed of light, it never decomposes ... I can break it into a thousand pieces in a second, send it to a thousand places, and recompose it all using a computer program.

One inflation rate is the rate at which cost of living is going up for a middle-class family. That's not the CPI, because the CPI is a manipulated market basket set by a politician or a bureaucrat that is engineered not to go up in price very fast. Most average people would find that their inflation rate is higher than the CPI. For example, we don't include the cost of buying a home in the CPI, even though it stands to reason that just about any reasonable person would want to buy a house at some point in their life.

What's the problem with diversification? Well, first of all, the problem with diversification is diversification is selling the winner to buy the losers. And the second problem with diversification is you're not really diversified at all, because everything you own is probably correlated to one currency, which is collapsing.

You have a bunch of money, say $250M, you want to hold it for 100 years, give it to your great-grandchildren. Where do you invest it? Well, if you put it into the dollar, the dollar is losing, at least, it's been losing 7-10% of its value a year for 100 years. Over the course of 100 years, the dollar loses 99% of its value.

Bitcoin is digital property that you can teleport anywhere in space instantly.

It's a virus. It's a cyber-virus. It's a chain reaction in cyberspace, or it's a life-form in cyberspace. Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace run by incorruptible software.

There is 100% certainty that you're going to lose 80% of your money in most currencies over the next decade. There's 100% certainty you're going to lose 95% of your wealth over 30 years in just about every currency.

Regulation's not bad ... The faster the regulation comes, the faster the 17,000 other cryptos get sorted in their buckets as securities, platforms, art, etc. And that will actually shake out a lot of the noise in the system, result in a lot of capital focusing upon the winner, which is Bitcoin, and it will also accelerate the entry of institutional capital into the space.

Once I realized that assets like the S&P and equity portfolios and real estate are driven primarily by monetary policy of the central banks, then I realized that holding money at 0% interest when the money supply is expanding at 10% is losing 10% of your wealth a year. And then I realized that, in fact, the money supply was expanding not at 10% but about 25% a year starting with the pandemic, and I was going to lose half my wealth on that treasury within 36 months.

Money is energy. Money is economic energy, social & political energy. Currency is a medium through which the energy moves. If you wish to hold energy and transport energy, you need a technology.

Inflation and diversification are both bromides. They are these simplistic terms that people toss around, but no one really thinks very deeply about them in my experience.

Inflation is not 2%. Inflation is not the CPI. It's not 7.5%. Inflation, properly understood, is simply the rate at which the price of anything appreciates in the currency.

We have had hyperinflation since 1971, but the inflation has manifested itself in the assets.

Bitcoin is a diversified index of the entire world economy—and certainly the crypto economy as it comes to its senses.

If you don't have a property or a currency with which you can store economic energy, that's like being a type 1 diabetic; you cannot store fat on your body. It means that you can eat as much as you want, you will literally starve to death.

I want to hold my money for 100 years, if not 1,000 years. The dollar won't work. The dollar's losing 2% of its value a month, which is horrific. And horrific over 36 months; it's catastrophic over 10 years ... This is where Bitcoin comes in.

The Fed printed 40% of all the dollars in existence in the 18 months that followed the pandemic.

Not only is Bitcoin impervious to cyber-attacks, it's also the solution to cyber-attacks

Bitcoin is property. Ethereum, everything else in the crypto ecosystem, likely they're all securities,

Digital energy is cyberpower. Bitcoin is cyberpower. The next war will be fought in cyberspace. If you don't master digital energy, you're not going to win it. You can't even defend against it.