CZ & Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy CEO) Fireside Chat

good morning and good afternoon to you

all thank you for joining us for what we

hope is the first of many finance

fireside chats i'm your host josh

goodbody and what better way for us to

kick off this series than by having two

esteemed titans of the crypto industry

michael saylor the ceo of microstrategy

and our very own cz founder and ceo of

finance michael cz welcome to you both

yep um glad to be here and michael

thanks for joining the show

very exciting

great stuff so guys today we're going to

start with a few hot topics then we're

going to move off piste into some

quickfire questions and then we're going

to finish up with some live q a does

that sound all right

yep awesome excellent okay so bitcoin

bitcoin bitcoin uh everyone's talking

about it it's the hot topic of the year

if not every single conversation right

now in wall street and main street

cz you've been known to encourage people

to slap themselves for selling their

bitcoin very brave may i say

and michael you're quite clearly

practicing what you preach at

microstrategy

michael why are you so bullish on

bitcoin tell us a little bit about how

you got here and where your current head

is at with respect to bitcoin

you know i didn't pay much attention to

the crypto industry until march of this

year and in march of this year we had a

k-shape recovery so i think that the

major macroeconomic event is is the

expansion of the m2 money supply

we were we had a money supply expanded

by about five and a half percent a year

for a decade

and starting this year it leaped forward

by about 24

and looking forward it looks like it's

going to expand by 15

every year for the next five years so

another way to say that is the cost of

capital just tripled

and if you're not beating the expansion

of the money supply with your returns

and investment you can't preserve wealth

you can't store value

so when the cost of capital tripled what

that meant was a bond that's not

yielding more than 15 percent is losing

value

and it meant that a stock that's not

growing its eps faster than 15 annually

is losing value and it meant the real

estate that can't grow its rents by

faster than 15

is losing value so the short of it is

there's 300 trillion dollars of of money

in the in these in fiat investments

they're all going to be cut in half

over the next three to five years

they're they're all in essence

everyone's going to lose half their

wealth

if they don't find a solution to the

problem so

why am i interested in bitcoin and the

crypto industry in general is because

there's a mad scramble to find a store

of value we know that cash won't work

and we know that bonds real estate and

stock are fiat instruments and they're

all going to be debased at the rate of

expansion of the money supply and so

what are you going to do you you search

through gold you consider silver you

consider commodities you consider buying

a portfolio of rare art

and eventually you settle upon the idea

of perfectly engineered

digital gold

something that is superior to gold in

all respects

not none of the liabilities of gold all

of the good attributes of gold and

that's 21 million gold coins called

bitcoin sitting in cyberspace

right and so once once you've found that

you think well this is the ultimate safe

haven asset and store of value for every

investor on earth and by the way it's

the solution to 7.8 billion people's

problem on art because everybody on the

planet has a currency that's collapsing

the only difference is in america and

europe is collapsing at 10 to 15 a year

and everywhere else it's collapsing

faster

so how can you not get enthusiastic

about that

yeah yeah fair point i think cece you've

been really you know banging that drama

and talking to those those themes around

currencies devaluing for a long long

time you've been in these crypto

trenches since the very early days

how does it feel for you now to see

companies like microstrategy and people

like michael saylor saying these things

publicly and being champions do you feel

relieved do you feel vindicated

well i just feel it's great to meet

people uh that are taking public

companies into crypto now um actually i

think michael sailor is definitely one

of the early adopters from a public

company perspective so before i was i

was always more talking on the

individual basis much easier to invest

individually so uh

seeing that uh seeing the uh taking

action to take publicly listed company

allocating a percent of that treasury

and publicly um uh doing intercrypt into

bitcoin is is really really refreshing

um i i didn't know how long it would

take i i thought it would take a long

time so uh seeing pioneers like michael

doing this now i think this is gonna i

actually think this is gonna start a

whole new trend and something that we i

actually didn't expect before but uh for

all the reasons michael said all those

reasons were there before

but this year definitely uh super kicked

that into like high gear and

supercharged it

so i think now

but but having um having all these sort

of crypto ogs talking about it on crypto

twitter in smaller groups is it's that's

one level of impact like we are we're we

usually talk we usually say we're just

talking about ourselves because we're

just trying to convince each other which

are already convinced but now we're

seeing this new wave coming in which is

really really refreshing and

and also michael is also a very um

articulate person um i follow your

tweets your tweets are always worded

really really um

well and it

has it has resonance so um i think yeah

just having having michael uh sort of

being the first public company to do

this and also being very vocal about it

is really really refreshing and we're

i'm just super happy

for more and more people like michael to

to join this industry

awesome and michael do you think we're

getting to this point that it actually

starts to become a conversation within

treasury functions in in not just public

holistic companies but other companies

whereby you're almost not doing your job

by considering bitcoin as a store of

value for your treasury function you're

almost remiss

for not looking at this in more detail

at what point do you think we're going

to be getting there or are we actually

already there and these conversations

are happening in more and more treasury

functions

i i think that march of this year was

the inflection point

if you had asked me what did i think

about bitcoin and what our treasury

invested in bitcoin in february

i would have said what is bitcoin or i

think i read about it but i'm not paying

attention to it and

if i'd walked into my boardroom and said

we should do it they would have thought

i'd gone crazy

and uh and by the way i didn't know

about it i wouldn't have done it i

wouldn't have been allowed to do it and

i wouldn't have had a good reason to do

it

and then i think in march we kind of got

hit in the head with a 2x4 it was a

wake-up call

and and again

the the rate of of asset inflation

tripled or quadrupled or quintupled and

so you could all the sudden the entire

industry shifted every rational investor

in the world today

knows

inflation is coming they know there's a

problem

so starting in april people had a

problem it was three times as intense as

it was in february

all the media started covering it

and all of the other solutions to the

problem started to look like they're not

working again so if you if you think

about how fast institutions move

you know it takes if you're if you're

wicked fast in three months you're

working on it in six months you've done

something and otherwise it's quarter by

quarter by quarter and so i think

i think you know we did it you saw

square do it and um

there's been a parade of a hundred

institutional uh

positive milestones that happened since

march and each one of those is is

building a tapestry

of momentum

and uh and it's making it easier for the

next company i think it's a no-brainer

that private companies i see a lot of

private companies working on it but i

also hear

institutions pension funds and

unions and endowments and things like

that are starting to move and uh and i i

also think public companies will do it i

think i think the hardest the hardest

hurdle is for public companies to do it

because there's

there's interlocking regulatory and

governance and accounting and and

strategic issues and communications

issues which are which are really tricky

to work through

but i think that uh

you know the hedge funds

the paul two to john stanley druckenmill

bill moore all of those they can move

faster and they typically want to front

run

the bigger players and then you have the

lumbering institutions and of course the

private companies and high net worth

individuals and family offices they're

uh they've got the same problem and uh

they can move faster and they don't they

don't have to put out a press release

saying what they did and why they did it

and justify it

yeah absolutely absolutely so

what's really clear is that you're

you're both super passionate about

growing this industry

cz 2020 has been a really

really good year for finance how do you

plan to continue this growth and kind of

try and foster a 10 in of this economy

that we're in what are your thoughts

around that

um so my thoughts on this industry is

actually quite simple um i think

basically the industry has to grow for

uh for us for businesses in this

industry to grow

but i'm very confident that the industry

will grow i think we're seeing

institutional participat before when we

talk about institutional participation

we're talking about

institutional traders potentially like

allocating some funds trading bitcoin or

something but now we're seeing treasury

institutional treasury come in and i i

actually i heard different versions of

this um of this rally and they were

saying that they're just a few

institutions allocating one percent of

their of their treasury into bitcoin and

that's that's causing this rally already

so uh and uh just imagine like uh how

much more demand there is one once more

once more of the treasury managers

figure out that this is what they need

to do

so um from from our from my perspective

i think this year yeah it has been

pretty bad in almost every other

instance but it has been good for the

crypto industry that is really showing

that the fundamentals of bitcoin

fundamentals of cryptocurrencies that it

is limited supply there's no inflation

it is a hedge against all these

other macroeconomic changes

and uh i think for uh

our our goal is really just to keep our

servers up

oh wow

why this industry is rallying so we got

to be able to handle the number of new

users coming we gotta handle like peak

traffic pick volumes uh gotta do our

kycml all of those things take although

most of those things don't scale very

well because they're sometimes human

components to them so we're just trying

to find out better ways to to be able to

service institutional participation as

we define it now like treasuries come in

um they will want they will want to they

will want to do due diligence on us and

how to service potentially um uh

micro seller uh micro strategy

firms like this so this is this is going

to be our challenge going forward i'm

not worried about the i'm not worried

about the industry i'm very worried

about the economy overall um but the

crypto economy the crypto industry

will be will be very good so i think

michael's really joining early and his

own words kind of front running um the

other late adopters so i think that's a

really smart strategy to adopt

cool so on that theme michael of trying

to ten times this industry let's think

even bigger let's let's say 100 times

this industry

what's your view on how we've got to get

there we were talking earlier around

things like demonstrating to people how

big the bitcoin economy is how do you

quantify the bitcoin community things

like that i think are really important

and you've got some great ideas on that

so do you want to share with us how you

think we can 10 times 100 times elements

of the the bitcoin economy

well i

yeah i i think that it starts by

rotating from then

from one uh narrative which is well

bitcoin is a very interesting

uncorrelated digital asset with high

volatility with high potential returns

and you can put one to two percent of

your portfolio into it with or without

leverage

but that's one

that that was unnarrative you know and

that the speculative narrative uh

was predominant before march but that's

not the that's not going to appeal to 99

of the investors or the money in the

world they want something different they

want

bitcoin is the ultimate synthetic

long-term treasury reserve asset it's

it's an engineered safe haven asset to

engineered to be superior to gold in all

aspects

of a bearer instrument that's a store of

value and if i go from one to the other

uh then i'm not talking about getting

one percent of the money from one

percent of the investors i'm talking

about getting fifty percent of the money

from a hundred percent of the investors

okay so

so uh what does that mean well i mean it

means that

the people that we want we we want to

appeal to are

the people that put their money in gold

because they don't trust fiat

instruments so there's 10 trillion

dollars there

so they'll be looking at you know how

does bitcoin compare to gold how does

bitcoin's volatility compared to gold

returns compared to gold trading

liquidity compared to gold

etc how many people hold bitcoin versus

people that hold gold

i think uh the second big by and that's

10 trillion dollars right so that gets

you a factor of

20 to 50 there

the second bucket is people with uh with

bonds

17 trillion dollars of negative yielding

debt a hundred trillion dollars of zero

to three percent yielding debt

what why are you putting money in bonds

sovereign wealth it's a safe haven so

people's reaction is the market gets

scary they run to a safe haven i think

it's pretty important in the in the

crypto industry and with regard to

bitcoin you position bitcoin as

the the ultimate long duration safe

haven asset so they run to it instead of

running to sovereign debt

to again another factor of 10 20 30. and

then finally

you've got a pool of big tech investors

a lot you could argue a lot of people

are using uh big tech like tesla apple

amazon as a store of value

they've lost faith in the currency

they know they can't invest in negative

yielding bonds

they're not quite sure about gold i mean

gold is defective it's an antiquated

store of value it was the best store of

value for 5 000 years until we invented

the computers easy right like yeah

it's like it's like the canon

camera was the best way to take photos

we put put photos and shoe boxes in our

attic until we invented the iphone it

was a good idea until it became not a

good idea libraries were a good idea

until google gave away a million books

for a nickel for everybody on earth and

then it became not so good an idea

and so what you've got here is people

running running to these things like

they're running to big tech they're

running to they're running to gold and i

i mean people are i don't know why

anybody would run to bonds by the way

like like slobber and debt yielding

negative i can't figure that one out but

they're all looking for a store of value

add up those three

it's 150 trillion dollars

you know bitcoin is 350. so the only

reason people wouldn't

buy into the idea of a crypto asset as a

treasury reserve

is because they don't understand it

or or they're afraid or when they show

up like when they show up to the

exchanges they get confused

so i i think that when i show up to

exchange if you show me

bitcoin versus gold versus sovereign

debt versus big tech and bitcoin

volatility versus apple volatility you

know by the way everybody says bitcoin's

too volatile apple's been more volatile

than bitcoin for the last 90 days you

know if they saw bitcoin versus tesla

vault tesla volatility bitcoin

volatility tesla is more volatile

than bitcoin and so when they see this

compared to big tech to debt and to gold

then you're telling them you can trade

the one for the other when they see

bitcoin compared to tron

eos chain link

and 37 currency pairs you're telling

them they can trade bitcoin versus tron

in in

cny or brl or ars but there aren't that

many people with money in ars in tron

that are going to convert it into

bitcoin so

you're and what you need to do is you

need to frame the investment hypothesis

for people

because anybody that sees gold debt or

tesla's tesla on the ticker is going to

say oh well this is a way i could tr i

can buy this or i can buy that right

you're going to attract the money into

the industry by looking outward

to the other and to the alt assets

and comparing bitcoin to that and then

once they get into bitcoin

you can you can then trade from bitcoin

into other cryptos if you're pursuing

privacy

currency stable coin application smart

contract all the other value

propositions of the crypto industry will

come through the gateway of bitcoin but

bitcoin

bitcoin is a bitcoin is 0.1

of the ocean of investable assets

99.9

are in the asset ocean

and we're talking about 0.1

so we need to carve a channel between

that ocean and that pond and we need to

tell people it's safe to convert your

gold to bitcoin

you're not low yielding debt to bitcoin

you're big tech to bitcoin and this is a

compelling idea i think that's how we

grow the industry

that's a really great idea you've given

us an idea michael i think finding a way

to

to show volatility of bitcoin versus all

these other assets that everyone invests

in all the time

is a really digestible way to demystify

and debunk the fact that bitcoin is

actually

not as volatile as people think um so

we've got an idea there cece let's take

that one and run with it

yeah and i think it also sounds like we

have to list uh gold um tesla and a

bunch of other

other

sorry platforms soon yeah

i think this is really good actually

yeah you know you know cz i spend so

many hours with my eyes glued to the

binance screen i have i have the binance

yellow

burned into my head i have stared at it

so long because you have

the liquidity minute by minute and the

best trading information in the industry

and if i'm trying to read the market i

go i go to binance

worldwide but but and you have you've

got you've got the makings of the

bloomberg of this space

if you

if you actually started to park tesla

amazon apple gold

you know and bond index metrics or

nasdaq metrics or or

or the like there then every big ev

every conventional investor that's not

currently a bitcoin or a crypto investor

would be going there thinking this is

cool i'll make one more point you know i

give a lot of interviews and i meet a

lot of people whenever anybody wants to

impress me with their deep knowledge of

investing in bitcoin you know what they

say like well you know that's very

interesting but you know isn't it

volatile

that i mean it's like the only thing

they've learned in a decade is sometime

in the last decade it was volatile

and what i say is i've stared at it

every day for the past 180 days

i have investments in 30-year u.s

sovereign bonds many days they're more

volatile

you know i have investments in apple

it's more volatile i've watched the

nasdaq be more volatile some days i've

watched 10 and 30-year debt be more

volatile i've watched silver be more

volatile nobody knocks those things

tesla obviously is more volatile than

the poster child of volatile and most

people don't really know what how

volatile it is and

if we had the rolling 30 and 90 day

volatility or the rolling 12-month

volatility was parked as a number

then then people wouldn't be you know

they're remembering that mount gox was

there was some volatility back then or

2017

and you you can't compete against

someone's memory of what you were when

you were 13 years old or when you were a

kid and they're like did you throw a

temper tantrum when you were in junior

high school i'm like well

i'm like 28 years old now i'm i mean

like why are you holding that against me

and the answer because we don't put it

in front of their face and if we could

if people are just saying

yeah you know bitcoin is 82 percent as

volatile as apple this month and here we

go

oh wow

yeah completely narrative

yeah yeah well so on picking up on one

thing that you've you've said there

michael um gold

i'd be

probably uh remiss not to talk about

gold for at least a minute or two um

bitcoin digital gold that's been the

narrative some people say that's

generous some people say that's not

doing a service at all uh to to bitcoin

um i remember you saying that bitcoin

was i think it was a million times

better than gold that's a bold claim

um so do you believe that it's already

replacing gold and if so you know why

it is a million times better than gold

and it's a million times better than

gold because of two ideas one

it is it is engineered virtual gold

which means it is all the virtues of

gold none of the liabilities of gold

right it's not centralized it has no

mass it moves at the speed of light

it's absolutely capped if god designed

virtual gold in cyberspace he would have

designed bitcoin okay

you know people that know this know that

god's name is satoshi right so

so that's one reason

but the other reason is because bitcoin

isn't just a synthetic safe haven asset

engineered to be spirit of gold bitcoin

is also

the world's first

thermodynamically sound monetary network

it it is a big tech

digital network it's facebook for money

or google for money or or like youtube

for money which means that when you act

it's a network engineered to host that

safe haven asset and it's an open

network so

every knock on bitcoin like well maybe

the transactions aren't too fast well

you know i watch binance they're pretty

fast on binance you know you're you're

going to but into bitcoin and a lot of a

lot of people's view of bitcoin is how

fast binance moves

and and so if it if you wanted to be a

payment network you plug square or

paypal into it it gets better

if you want it to be a trading network

or a finance company you plug binance

into it it gets better if you want to be

an institutional offer and you plug

grayscale or nydig into it it gets

better it's an open you want it to be

more secure you know you've got your

cold storage hardware wallets on one

extreme

you want it to be easier you know

eventually it's going to get built into

apple pay and google pay why

because apple pay and google are going

to have to respond to square and paypal

why

because

politicians destroyed the savings

account and if i take square cash

application without bitcoin it's a free

checking account and i can move money

around but when i take square cash

application and i plug in bitcoin

it's a free checking account with a

savings account that's been yielding a

hundred percent interest tax-free over

the past decade every year

so do you want a savings account that

yields a 100 interest of your paypal or

or square yeah

do 7.8 billion people want it yeah

can apple and google and facebook afford

to not offer a savings account in

cyberspace that yields a hundred percent

more than the next bank

not i mean like this is not a lot but a

little trinket right this is about

gives you

zero interest and your money your money

is worth half as much in 36 months or

it's going up and doubling every year

so

why is bitcoin a million times better

than gold because you can engineer it

into

a mobile app into an exchange into any

piece of software and it's on an open

protocol

so that that idea of an open monetary

network

where where virtual gold moves at the

speed of light and eventually

finds its way into amazon and google and

facebook and apple and you know and

square and and then there's this little

war right like square's going to be

paypal so they need one more button you

know and apple's going to like put in

one more button and who's going to win

the market right i mean it's you guys

know it's a very brutal market in

exchanges right it's what's the next

feature you're going to add

nobody is going to engineer another

feature into gold right

old is going to be the same thing it has

been

you know the last innovation was like a

london good delivery bar with 400

ounces

stamped or whatever okay

that's your best innovation how do you

make how do you engineer better and the

point is you can't any more than you can

improve polaroid pictures than a shoe

box and you're adding it can't make them

better

yeah i think i think michael says

something that's really really

interesting there um i think what uh

what michael described there is

partially um what binance card does

today which allows you to spend crypto

directly from your crypto savings

account and it actually works with

google pay and apple pay but not in all

or

not in all locations now so we will

definitely absolutely work on to uh to

to to to increase the coverage of that

but there's something else that michael

you mentioned that that's really

interesting i want to pick your brand a

little bit which is you mentioned

pension funds and sovereign sovereign

funds right so now we have

individuals investing in crypto public

companies now investing in crypto when

do you think the pension funds and

sovereign funds are going to are going

to jump in and what process is going to

require them to come into to do this

because eventually they will have to

they will they will have to they'll have

to abandon ship and hold some bitcoin

right

i i wouldn't be surprised if we don't

start to read about

pension funds and sovereign wealth funds

investing in in bitcoin next year and in

the next 12 months

um

look this is

god's gift right this is the perfect

instrument for someone that needs long

duration

so when i look at anything i look out a

hundred years cz and then i look out 30

years i look out 10 years

you know and if you need if you need to

leave wealth

to

your your grandchildren in 30 years

how are you gonna do it and if you

needed to leave it to your great great

grandchildren and a hundred years how

are you gonna do it and and you cycle

through you're like well real estate's

gonna get taxed away and maybe the

regime will fail and you can't carry

your real estate from one place to

another place

companies are getting taxed on income

tax employment tax tariffs

etc and they've got corporate risk and

they've got massive competition you

can't be sure any company will be in a

hundred years

you know then then you've got bonds well

every bond is unless it's growing faster

than the money supply it's diluting so

you're going to lose most of your bond

then you've got gold and you know gold

miners are gonna print it you know two

three percent a year and then it's

corruptable and you can counterfeit it

and the dir and the pro you know they're

derivatives and they're not backed one

for one they're fractional derivatives

so

so you're on this mad dash how do i find

something that i can hold forever

and a lot of a lot of times you know

individuals that are trading they're

thinking what forever is 30 days right

like three days

you know like three months

three years like no who thinks past

three years

well pension funds by by charter they

have to think 30 years

they have to think 50 years they have to

think you know a hundred years a durable

thing so

find me the best long duration store of

value in the world and

and the answer is

every single monetary network the fiat

networks bond networks stock networks

real estate networks they're not closed

systems you can create more of them

which means that they have a leak they

bleed energy two percent a year three

percent a year one percent a year seven

percent a year

well

bitcoin is the one thing that's a closed

system you can't create more than 21

million coins

you might slightly decrease the amount

but they're never going to be more than

that

and the definition of a closed system is

is you can't put mass in

all you can do is put energy in

and energy

is

monetary energy

right it's money so as as monetary

energy flows into bitcoin it sits like a

like in the network like a monetary

battery

this is a battery that will hold the

charge for 100 years

that's the big idea no one's

the institutions are just now starting

to wake up to this idea that

if you put your energy into a real

electric battery it drains two percent a

month you're going to lose 24 of your

electricity in a year you put it into a

gold battery you lose 3 a year

you put it into bitcoin you're not

losing any

energy

that makes it so superior for every

pension fund every everyone looking for

a long duration

that once that message gets out

they're gonna stampede to it it's just a

matter of education and them getting

comfortable

and then solving all the on-ramp issues

you know and making it easy for them

that's our job yeah yeah education

well we do a lot of it and we want to do

more of it i think but we need all of

these really compelling narratives and

bringing them to as many people as

possible

and on that topic cz you've talked a lot

about how

bitcoin can act as an ideal hedge

against devaluing currencies

this is becoming even more topical

during this really strange 2020 clovid

year that we've all been in

has your view changed or has your view

reinforced based on what you've seen

government action throughout 2020

oh yeah i mean my views definitely

reinforced um so yeah i think basically

i've come to the i've come to this view

a few a couple years ago and then um

what's happening in 2020 is just

eyes opening like i didn't think it

would happen this fast

but having covid having the pademic

economic uh

shutdowns

and then government printing money like

crazy really really demonstrated that

this concept of

some money right so bitcoin is a

deflationary people lose it here and

there so it doesn't increase it slowly

decreases over time

and then it is yep and then like earlier

this year in march uh in april people

says why did bitcoin drop uh together

with uh

traditional fiat instruments stocks and

people are questioning is it the store

value or not but now look it's very very

clear right it is a very good store

value and um so i think um uh yeah i

think what uh what's really interesting

is michael does have the long-term

version the long-term mindset whereas

people who are trading actively um they

have a very short mindset and when you

look at things on a shorter horizon yes

it is volatile maybe less volatile than

tesla or even apple but it is still very

relatively volatile in the short term in

on the short time frames but when you

when you when you look at a longer time

frame bitcoin has just jumped like a few

times in history and i think will

continue to jump um in the long run so

yeah all of my views are super super

strongly and for uh reinforced this year

so i'm i just

well i don't have any fiat so i couldn't

buy bitcoin i couldn't buy more

cryptocurrency so

so my assets are already all crypto but

yeah i'm not

i don't even think about selling

in terms of selling it anymore it's just

it's asset i hold it's asset i spend

when i when i need to spend it i swipe

my binance card or whatever and um i i'm

this is the asset i hold i'm using it to

buy stuff i'm not i'm not selling this

stuff into fiat like why would i do that

right so uh yeah so that that's kind of

my view i think which

is very much in line with uh uh what

michael tweeted a few days ago

you have to buy everything into bitcoin

you only want to buy you only want to

buy the with the money that you want to

keep yeah

yeah absolutely so just just for the

record cesar you said something

interesting there

you do not hold any fiat currency at

this moment in time

no i i i hold like a couple thousand

dollars ish um so basically just

just there are parts of our lives which

we still have to spend fiat so i only

convert when i have to spend so i don't

i don't hold any meaningful amount at

all

in vr currencies josh i think the

metaphor is it used to be a checking

account in a savings account and your

savings account uh

paid you five percent interest or six

and money didn't keep devaluing and and

the checking account didn't pay you an

interest you could write check and pay

bills in it

and then along came this banking

innovation that you could actually write

checks against your savings account so

everybody put all their money in the

savings account because who doesn't want

to get interest on their money

and then of course the next innovation

is banks took the interest rate of

savings account to zero

right and then the next innovation is

they took they started making the money

worth 10 or 15 percent less every year

so when cz keeps all his money in crypto

it's the same as saying well do you want

to store your money in something like

bitcoin that's gone up a hundred percent

on average per year

for the last decade or do you want to

keep it in something which is going to

go up zero percent per year

and so when someone says well i

allocated two percent of my portfolio to

bitcoin and 98 of my portfolio to other

things i think

well you're going to buy a basket of

fiat instruments that are going to be

debased at 10 to 15 a year while you

have a small percentage of things

that are going to go up in value it it

doesn't make any sense that you would

you would people go well i'm managing

risk

well you're 100 guaranteed to lose half

your money in 36 months if you invest in

cash instruments so how are you managing

risk to guarantee that you're losing

half your money yeah that's what they're

called

management of decline yeah manage

decline

no they're guaranteed to decline they

don't want any risk of it not declining

yeah exactly wow that's a new pro that's

a new product we should we should market

that yeah um so michael you're you're a

bull you're a bitcoin bull you've even

had people writing songs about you i'm

not gonna ask you what your view of that

song is um but just a thumbs up or a

thumbs down we'll do finale

i think that the big the big advantage

of bitcoin is it's a swarm of cyber

hornets and they're doing things to help

the ecosystem all the time right whether

you know about it or not

and i just love the creativity of the

hive mind right this creature that's

just massively

parallel

processing innovating and researching

and developing ideas to see what's going

to work and if it'll help then it gets

elevated through the system to the good

of everybody and and i like that

creativity it's great

brilliant love the metaphor

do you have any other interest then

i'm not saying holdings but i mean just

interest philosophically practical

interest in other crypto assets or any

other protocols out there

you know my interest in crypto i i look

at crypto as creating life in cyber

space

and so

you write the protocol is the dna

and you're releasing a life form

and and bitcoin is like a base level

life form it's almost like the allergy

which is the base plankton level of all

life on earth right it's it's

a plant life

and then you can create other forms of

life that you can release

life that

life that might do things that bitcoin

doesn't do right i mean we all know that

bitcoin doesn't do everything it doesn't

do as much privacy as you would want it

doesn't do as much smart contracts as

you would want it doesn't do

as as fast as transactions as you would

want these are all different life forms

now why do you want a life form in in

cyberspace or a crypto

if you're in search of immortal

sovereignty

right if you need something to transcend

a government a country or a company

not not everything needs to by the way i

i love binance as a digital exchange and

i don't need it to transcend you cz or

transcend but i think it's

i mean

i if if i want to give all my money to

my great great great great grandchildren

i'm more likely to do it in bitcoin

than do it then leave it on the binance

exchange and you could figure out why

right but at the same time

i think that the world needs to have a

mixture of cryptos a mixture of digital

assets you know there's a place for all

these things and

i think that um

that uh the real key is you you know

when you're playing god

in cyberspace

you kind of got to get the genetic dna

protocol just right before you and then

you release it

and then you let it grow and it fills

its ecosystem and

and what we've got is the cambrian

explosion of of crypto life forms

and some are going to live

and some are not going to live

and the market is like this darwinian

natural selection process

right and uh you know we'll see what

happens it's fascinating

yeah survival of the fittest

i think so really yeah i i i like i

share an almost identical view as

michael um on this topic um yeah i mean

there's there are um there are many

bitcoin is the most decentralized uh

based platform um it is the is the king

of all the other cryptocurrencies there

are other innovations which many people

are doing in this ecosystem and which we

are participating

and um yeah and it's good it's good to

have this uh uh ecosystems of life forms

uh here but um the majority of them will

not stay forever and but the one percent

one will grow to be much bigger so um

yeah i i i share that with you very very

strongly

fantastic

go ahead

so i was just going to draw this section

to a close um and we're going to move

into what we're calling the quick fire

questions some are crypto related some

have absolutely nothing to do with

crypto so i hope you've prepared

yourselves um we're going to ask some

hard talk here nothing too spicy or

controversial so don't be scared but we

will be asking some good questions um cz

i'm going to start with you

when did you

first start looking at bitcoin seriously

can you think of the month

or even the year of course but can you

think of the month when you thought

right this is something i'm going to get