Michael Saylor Keynote | Bitcoin for America

Um I'm delighted to have the opportunity

to speak today. Um the word strategic

Bitcoin reserve uh to the casual

observer stand like they sound like a a

stockpile of an asset. To uh a closer

observer, it sounds like a stockpile of

the most valuable asset the human race

has ever invented. But I'm here today to

show you how the strategic Bitcoin

reserve represents a strategy for United

States digital supremacy in the 21st

century. The president

uh with uh his vision has established a

strategic Bitcoin reserve as of last

week and has declared that uh America

will be the Bitcoin superpower. Uh that

is precient. Uh, I would hazard to guess

that the great majority of the people

that saw that post don't even know what

Bitcoin superpower means and they

haven't really considered it. Uh, I was

inspired by the words and uh, that uh,

caused me to put together this

presentation

today. Why is Bitcoin critical to the

prosperity of the United States in the

21st century? That is the question we

all should be

asking. Um there are many metaphors for

thinking about a strategic reserve of

Bitcoin. Uh Bitcoin is digital capital.

If we thought of it as Bitcoin is

digital capital. Is this a stockpile of

cheese? Is this a stockpile of oil,

natural gas, or even uranium? All of

which would be interesting. Well, at its

worst case and in in its narrowest form,

you could think about the strategic

Bitcoin reserve as a stockpile of the

apex asset of the human race. And so,

what's it worth? Well, over the next 20

years, I think it's worth anywhere from

three trillion to 106 trillion dollars

to the United States.

uh US

corporations uh like my corporation are

actually recapitalizing on Bitcoin.

We've gone from having $250 million of

assets 48 months ago to having nearly

$45 billion of assets in 48 months. If

you look out over the next 20 years,

corporations that are accumulating

Bitcoin on their reserve like MSTR, like

MEA, like Riot, uh they're going to have

20 to40 trillion. So, this is a small

metaphor, but it's a powerful metaphor.

But, you know, it's hard to rent out or

finance or develop your cheese or your

gold or your natural gas buried in a

vault. So, a more powerful metaphor is

Bitcoin is digital property. If you own

5% of Manhattan and your family owned it

for 100 years and someone said, "How you

going to pay your bills?" You wouldn't

say, "We're just going to sell it." You

would say, "We're going to rent it.

We're going to develop it. We're going

to put a building on top of it, a

business on top of it. or we're going to

finance it, we're going to borrow

against it. The same is true with

Bitcoin. In 20 years, the United States

could be generating $10 trillion per

year by renting, developing, or

financing the assets in that strategic

Bitcoin reserve. The AIS are coming. The

AIs don't get bank accounts. They don't

get credit cards. The AIs, the

artificial intelligence economy, will be

built on digital capital, digital

property. It'll be a hundred trillion

dollar economy. It'll be built on

Bitcoin. Well, a lot of people they

think of it as an asset. You think of it

as a property. But what we know to be

true is that Bitcoin is actually a

network. And it's not just any network.

It's not an information network. It's an

energy network. It's a conservative

network. I can send a billion dollars

from me to you. I lose it. You have it.

that is the conservation of energy in

cyberspace. So when you start to

visualize Bitcoin as a digital energy

network, what you realize is that

trillions of dollars of digital commerce

will flow over that network. The the

banking system of the world is going to

rebuild itself on a digital energy

network. We're going to have 40,000

banks that'll be settling with each

other in real time finally moving

billions, tens of billions or hundreds

of billions of dollars an hour over a

pure digital network. Right? So if you

if you look at a ma look at the world

and imagine digital energy moving around

the world and then you ask the question

would you want to own it or would you

want to ignore

it? It's an important question and of

course you know I think some of you

might have seen the cyber blackout of X

yesterday and all the cyber attacks. The

last and most important metaphor is when

we have open digital energy flowing it

is a commerce network. But when we

reverse that digital energy into a

shield it becomes a defense system.

Bitcoin is a digital defense system.

Bitcoin messages, data

authentications,

transactions, they're unstoppable,

uncorruptible, immutable, immune to

tampering by any known cyber threat. You

can protect the United States commercial

and military and financial systems

behind a wall of digital energy. And and

that's exactly how we will do it.

You know, even Elon Musk pointed out,

the AIs don't know how to hack Bitcoin.

They can spoof you out of your money.

They can convince you that there's

someone they're not. There's no way to

trick uh an 800 xahash uh digital wall

that's based on modern encryption. Uh

the AIs won't get through that wall.

What's driving the growth of

Bitcoin? It is the most powerful force

in the world right now. It's growing

nearly 60%. It's uh it's become the

seven the eighth largest asset in the

world. It's about to become the largest

asset in the world in the next 48

months. What is it? It's it's all of the

smart money in the world running from

risk running from the past toward the

future from something less secure to

something more secure. And they're doing

it in the most visible way with their

capital. This is a a map of the wealth

distribution in the world about $900

trillion

dollars. If you break it into uses, half

of it is just a store of value. We're

long-term. We're we're preserving our

capital for the long term. We just want

to keep our money. The other half are

assets held for utility. I want to do

something with the asset. If you drill

into the 450 trillion, you realize the

problem is that that long-term capital

is being dissipated and decimated by

fires, by floods, by famines, by

tariffs, by wars, by competition, by

rust, by

obsolescence, by tors, uh by

traffic, you name it. Right? What's that

cost? That cost 10 trillion a year.

There's 10 tr people are people go what

is Bitcoin's use case? The use case is

to not suffer $10 trillion dollar a year

of damage from entropy from inflation

from chaos from the future. Bitcoin is

an asset without the financial risk of a

currency, a bond, a stock, and it

doesn't have the physical risk of real

estate and property. And we're stripping

away the counterparty risk to

everything. And so we're moving away

from risk. And what that means is that

as the word spreads that there's an

opportunity to keep your money without

taking risk, long-term capital is being

merged into the Bitcoin

network. The greatest digital

transformation of the 21st century, it

isn't the transformation of music. It

isn't the transformation of your photos,

your communications, your Facebook

friends, or educational videos. Although

each of those things made a trillion

dollar company, the greatest digital

transformation is the transformation of

capital. It's the it's the it's the

transformation of 450 trillion. What's

it worth? It's worth half of everything.

It's half of everything. That's the

transformation. Digital capital is

stronger, faster, and smarter capital.

Everything you don't like about the

building stripped away and you've got an

invisible, indestructible, immortal,

teleportable building. It's a better

building. It's global capital. It's

everybody that's living in Asia and

Africa and South America would move to

the US if they could. They'd move their

money to the US if they could. They want

the currency of the of the US. They want

the property of the US. They want the

security of the US. They want the values

of the US, but they can't have it. So

the second best thing they can have is

move their money into the Bitcoin

network which has all of the values,

protections, and securities of the

US. Bitcoin is immortal capital, right?

You can keep your money for a thousand

years. A 10 basis point fee works out to

a useful lifetime of a thousand years.

All the other long-term capital assets

have a life of 10 to 100 years. Find a

business you want to invest in that'll

be around for 500 years. Find a building

that will last for 500 years. Find a

bond that will pay off in 500 years.

Find a piece of art that'll still be

legible in 500

years. And finally, what we all know in

this room is that Bitcoin is and digital

capital is ethical capital. It's the

only thing in this world you can truly

own. If you have possession of the keys,

if you have possession of the knowledge

of where the keys might be, you own the

thing. No one can take the thing away

from you. Everything else you have in

this world, you own at the pleasure of

someone more powerful than you until

they decide to take it away from you.

Satoshi gave us property rights, sound

money, sovereign

money. It's it's a network, but what is

it? It's the world's most powerful

network. 800 xahash. What's the measure

of digital power? It's xahash. 20

gigaww. all the electricity, all the

power that fires up the US Navy. It's

also got the most economic power. My

company spent $33

billion to buy 2.4% of the network. Do

the math in your head, you'll realize

there's a trillion dollars of real money

that has flowed into this network and

there's a trillion dollars of smart

money behind it. It's the world's most

global fault tolerant, unstoppable

network. Each of those ASIC chips is

hundreds of thousands of laptop

computers. You'd need trillions and

trillions of computers to dent this

network. And then of course many people

say, "Oh, I get it. It's a network

effect. It must be a network." Yeah.

Well, it's not a metafian network.

That's just enough information about

networks to hurt

yourself. It's not getting more powerful

with the square of the number of nodes.

It's getting more powerful based upon

the amount of mass, energy, and capital

flowing in the network. It's a Newtonian

network like the solar system. When the

white dwarf comes past your planet, it's

going to suck the atmosphere off your

planet. It's a white dwarf is not the

same as an asteroid the same size. They

are different. Bitcoin is the brightest

thing in the financial universe, right?

Heat and light, it's it's the most

interesting. It's growing stronger. It's

growing hotter. It's growing denser as

it draws the capital of the world into

its orbit. What capital? Physical

capital. People are selling their

buildings. Financial capital. They're

they're going to trade out their their

low-grade bonds, their currencies in

third world and in the second world.

Foreign capital. They're going to sell

their Siberian real warehouses and their

Russian natural gas rights. It's drawing

antiquated capital, the capital of the

20th century. It's drawing smart

capital. Anybody that thought about it

and thought, do I want to be invested in

something that's going to decay or be

destroyed over time by a hundred

uncertain risks or do I want to just

keep my money in cyerspace? And then

digital capital, right? The AIs, they

don't get the bank account. As the

economy digitizes, people want to move

digital money at the speed of light with

a million a million transactions a

second. You're not doing it with a

Siberian warehouse. You're not doing it

with natural gas or gold. You're not

going to do it with any 20th century

asset. Where is it headed? Well, there's

an open-source model. You can download

it on GitHub called Bitcoin 24. Plug in

your own

assumptions. Our assumptions, well,

Bitcoin's currently 22 basis points of

the global economy. That's $2

trillion over 20 years. Right now, it's

been growing about 60% a year. If it

decelerates from 60% a year to 20% a

year, the the average return is going to

be 29% a year over the 20 years. That is

the base case that arrives at at a price

of $13 million of Bitcoin in USD terms

or $280

trillion in the network. Does the world

turn upside down? No. What happens?

Well, everything pretty much stays the

same except for those that embrace

Bitcoin get rich and

powerful. Those that don't embrace

Bitcoin get weaker and poorer.

Otherwise, everything that you see in

the world today will still be there in

the world in 20

years. Bitcoin is not a threat to the

dollar. The dollar is

currency. Bitcoin is capital. In the

modern world, there are plenty of

academic economists. They will just

recite add infinitum. Well, money is a

store of value, a medium of exchange, a

unit of account. There I told you. and

they just haven't really thought about

that past just wrote memory. This is why

you shouldn't wrote memorize stuff in

education. Think a little bit harder

about what's going on here. If you need

money for the next four weeks in

Argentina, then you're using the peso.

If you need money for the next four

years in Argentina, you're using the

dollar. If you need money for the next

40 years in Argentina and you're smart,

you're using the Bitcoin. And so the

dollar is competing but is competing

against the M2 money supply of the CNY

Chinese currency, European currency,

Japanese currency. Right now we're about

17% of that. We should be able to grow

to 30% of that. How? With digital

currency. If US banks and US

corporations can issue digital

currencies backed by the US Treasury, we

will expand that supply of US currency

by $10 trillion.

Right? That's a that's a digital asset

strategy. That's why the stable coin

bill and the Genius Act matter. It is

not capital. Bitcoin is less than 1% of

the capital of the world. What does it

compete with? Not the dollar. Bitcoin

competes with

property, equity, and it bonds.

Property, equity, and bonds. And what is

it? It's 1%. And what is it going to? I

just showed you the shocker $13 million

Bitcoin forecast. That gets us to 13% of

the capital in 2045. We have two

strategies. Expand our currency to

dominate the world with the digital

currency of choice. Expand our capital

to dominate the world with the digital

capital of choice. Why should the US

want to be the Bitcoin superpower?

You cannot remain a sovereign nation if

you lose control of your

airspace, outer space, or cyber space.

This is a truism. It's pretty important.

We're not talking about making a little

bit of money here. We're talking about

defending the American way of life. A

superpower has to keep the air routes

open. You must be able to fly, not just

fly from here to London. You need to be

able to fly from New York to Chicago

with if you look at what happened in the

first Gulf War. We took control of Iraqi

airspace. Within a week, their entire

country was nonfunctioning. Some people

would say within 48 hours they were

non-functioning. This country won't

function for 48 hours after we lose

control of our airspace. How do we

protect it? We have air force bases. We

have military aircraft. This is

evolving. It will continue to evolve.

Drones, very sophisticated defense

systems. We have to keep open our sea

lanes. This is a truism for a thousand

years. The Carthaginians knew it. That's

why the Romans destroyed them. The

Carthaginians had destroyed the Venetian

fleet. Every single port in the

Mediterranean that was a Venetian port

was also a Roman port was also a

Carthaginian port was also a Phoenician

port. Why? because you must keep the sea

lanes open if you would be a superpower.

If I cut off your sea lanes, I choked

your economy. Uh the Japanese determined

this or found this out in World War II.

Sea power requires naval bases operating

appropriate

ships. A superpower has to keep its

cyber channels open. What does that

mean? It means your communication

channels for digital

information, but it also means your

communication channels for digital

energy. I need to be able to move a

signal, but I need to move a10 billion

dollar chunk of money. I don't just need

to keep the cyber channels open around

the world. It's not just I want to move

that information or that energy between

New York and

Tokyo. If I if I lose control of

cyerspace over the United States, I

can't move information between New York

and

Chicago. Right? You lose cyerspace,

you'll lose your own digital economy.

What would you do if your enemy got

control of your cyberspace? You saw just

again yesterday, you can't even log into

X. Well, what happens when you can't log

into your bank account? Cyber power

requires Bitcoin miners operating A6,

throwing up a wall of digital energy,

and you want to hope that more than 50%

of that is controlled by you or your

allies. What does it mean to own

cyberspace?

If you want to be a boot a Bitcoin

superpower, you need to own the asset.

Own Bitcoin. But that's only half of it.

Owning all of New York City and losing

control of the sea lanes and the

airspace above New York City is uh a

pirick victory, right? You won't own it

very long. It'll get

shredded. You have to control the

network, the cyber network, the digital

energy network that flows around the

world.

AI is the future. The computers, the

AIs, they're going to they're smarter

than us. They're going to think faster

than us. At some point, they'll be

thinking a million times a second,

talking to each

other, right? And and if you want to

build the greatest economy in the world,

your cars need to drive themselves. The

robots need to think, the factories need

to think, and your agent needs to be

thinking a million times a second about

how to do something useful for you.

Digital intelligence requires digital

energy which has to be secured by

digital power in order to engage in

digital commerce. When I say digital

commerce, I don't just mean buying

trinkets on Amazon. I mean moving all of

the money and securing all the assets of

the world. I mean 950 trillion going to

4,000 trillion dollars of assets. And it

couldn't be clearer where that's headed

right now. The unit of digital energy is

the Satoshi. The unit of digital power

is the

Exahash.

Right? What are the benefits to America

of the Bitcoin

strategy? Embrace Bitcoin. We own the

21st century. All the money, all the

capital of the world is moving out of

the 20th century. Everything that was

that made sense, every educated finance

here was educated in the 20th century.

They were taught a bunch of broomemides,

a bunch of rules. All of those rules

probably made sense in the 20th century.

The way we fought World War II is not

the way we fight World War II. Every

military doctrine, every financial

doctrine, it might have been right at

one point, it's not right any longer.

trillions of dollars of capital is going

to flow from those physical and

financial assets into digital into the

Bitcoin network. Okay, you might say,

well, I'm making a strong assertion.

Bitcoin is the digital capital network.

I'm not just the one making that

assertion. The president of the United

States made that assertion last week,

explained by David Saxs on Friday night.

He said, "Bitcoin is the only crypto

asset that is truly decentralized. It is

special." Maybe in the future there

might be some other digital capital. The

US government doesn't recognize any

other digital capital. Nor do we. And

that's because 99% of the power in the

crypto ecosystem is in the Bitcoin

network. If you want to own cyerspace

and own the future, you need to own

it. Embrace Bitcoin and strengthen the

dollar. We have the chance to establish,

own and control the global digital

capital network that is Bitcoin. We can

back the US dollar with Bitcoin

reserves. The only monetary asset that

is competitive to the dollar. If I need

a liquid fungeable asset to capitalize a

company or an institution is not real

estate, it's not natural

gas. It's not art. It's not private and

public equity

portfolios. It's not even going to be a

index of equity. The only asset that I

can use other than Bitcoin is US

treasuries everywhere in the world. If

anybody ever decides to replace those,

they'll replace them with Bitcoin. We

should own

both. Embrace Bitcoin. Attract foreign

capital. All it's not just we're getting

the 20th century money. We're getting

the rest of the world's money. If I gave

you money, I dropped you. If I took all

your money, I dropped you in Africa and

I said, "You got to invest in a

diversified portfolio of private and

public equity and real estate art in

Africa." Or you can put your money into

the digital capital network and move it

anywhere else at the speed of light. And

I gave you a choice to punch the orange

button or leave it in Africa for a

hundred years. You would punch the

orange button.

Everybody else in the world's figuring

out the same thing right now. That's why

countries will make laws against it.

That's why the Chinese have have export

controls on their capital. All of the

capital will flow into the US. But if

you can't physically come to the US, the

next best thing is you flow into the

digital capital network and you get all

the protections of the

US. And finally, you embrace Bitcoin.

When you empower Americans, it's

American companies with Bitcoin on the

balance sheet. They're going to outlast,

outperform, and outlive their

competitors. It's American institutions

that are holding Bitcoin. They're going

to enrich their shareholders. The

beneficiaries are

us. And the last

point, with the appropriate digital

assets framework, we can become the

bankers to the world. Right? When we

export Bitcoin to the world, we're

exporting our values, sovereignty, sound

money, integrity, property rights. When

we export digital currency, we're

literally exporting our currency. If we

create other digital securities or

digital tokens, we'll be exporting our

companies, our ideas, our securities,

our financial products to the world. We

can dominate this industry.

So, how should the US pursue a Bitcoin

strategy? Well, Senator Lemus has has

given us a clear guideline with the

Bitcoin Act in Nashville in

July. And what the Bitcoin Act said, it

said, "Let's acquire a million Bitcoin

over a five-year period in a

programmatic, disciplined fashion,

transparent to

all." And so let's consider the

consequences of of this

strategy. Well, first of all, last week

the president signed the Strategic

Bitcoin resil uh reserve act or or

order. If we hold that 200,000 Bitcoin

for the next 20 years, even though you

see a flat line on the screen, the flat

line is worth $3

trillion. So that's the value of doing

nothing. Sometimes people think that you

have to do something to make money.

Sometimes the absence of doing awful and

stupid things is making money. Doing

stuff is highly overrated. If the stuff

is trading or selling your

Bitcoin, the Lumis bill would acquire a

million Bitcoin or 1.2 million Bitcoin.

If you look at the consequences of that

over the time frame, it it's worth $16

trillion to the nation.

If you get a bit more aggressive and we

go for 2 another million Bitcoin, it's

worth $34 trillion to the nation. In

this case, there's a bit of reflexivity.

If the United States starts to more

aggressively stockpile Bitcoin, it's

going to accelerate the growth of the

network. Uh it's going to accelerate

capital flowing in the network. It's

going to increase and expand the overall

digital capital network.

If we move to a triple max strategy, you

start to you'll end up with 4 million

Bitcoin. That's worth $73

trillion to

America. And of course, President Trump

has laid out a guideline. We should be

the superpower. If you want a superpower

strategy, here's a superpower strategy.

Acquire Bitcoin consistently. By the

way, over what time frame? Consistently

daily. between now and

the.99 0.99 is January of the year 2035

the point at which 99% of the Bitcoin

supply has been mined the asset becomes

effectively capped for all practical

purposes because the last 1% comes out

over a hundred

years 99 between now and then is that's

you've got 10 years for the digital gold

rush you should get your Bitcoin before

there's no more Bitcoin for you and you

can see Here in this strategy, we

acquire it consistently and then we use

surpluses from the US government to

continue to save in Bitcoin. It's worth

$106

trillion to the United States. And so

what does that look like?

Well, the Lumis

plan, which is grand, is modest in some

ways, and a modest strategic Bitcoin

reserve plan neutralizes the national

debt. Sometimes doing modest things are

actually brilliant as long as you do the

thing. It's like the people that bought

just a little bit of Bitcoin in 2012. It

was a modest investment. It made them

billionaires. A modest thing 20 years in

advance is a brilliant

thing. If you're more

aggressive, the Triple Max plan negates

the national debt.

The superpower

plan creates a global

bought 78% of the United States for $40

million. $40 million purchased nearly

80% of this

country. Think about it for a second.

Bitcoin is the greatest opportunity of

the 21st century, right? It's worth

anywhere from three trillion to 106

trillion depending upon how programmatic

and aggressive we want to pursue this

opportunity. These opportunities don't

come along often. This is the once in a

century

opportunity. And as Donald Trump has

said, never sell your Bitcoin, right?

And uh I'll leave you with the final

thought. What happens if we allow

another nation to claim title to Bitcoin

superpower? If we don't claim it, we

give them control of the network. We

give them all the wealth in the world.

We risk being impoverished and

imperiled by a hostile nation that

controls all the world's digital energy.

You could have clung to your glass beads

when the world went to the gold

standard. You could have clung to your

steam engines when the world went to to

internal combustion. You know, you could

have kept your wood burning stoves when

Rockefeller offered you petroleum. We

could have dismissed nuclear power. The

man we once had another project. We had

a Manhattan project. It was a large

investment in nuclear

energy. Do you want to control the

world's digital energy? Because the

digital economy will run on digital

energy. The choices are is either

prosperity or poverty in the 21st

century. Bitcoin is manifest destiny for

America. Thank

[Applause]