Bitcoin’s $200T Future: CoinDesk Spotlight with Michael Saylor

Michael: You can understand Bitcoin as digital capital.

It is the asset without the issuer.

If it's digital capital, then it's going to grow to a 200

trillion plus network over time.

And the value to the United States is anywhere from 3 trillion to 100 trillion

if the U. S. begins to acquire Bitcoin.

as digital capital, it can negate or retire the national debt, or it can

convert us from owing 40 trillion to, to owning 40 trillion of net assets.

So it's a very powerful financial lever.

Christine: Michael Saylor is a leading Bitcoin advocate serving as executive

chairman of Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, one of the largest

holders of Bitcoin with about half a million in BTC in its corporate treasury.

His bold strategies and unyielding belief in Bitcoin as digital gold have

made him an influential and sometimes polarizing voice in both tech and finance.

Michael.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for joining us.

Michael: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Christine: It's been an exciting year for you.

Most recently, you've unveiled a 100 trillion crypto

strategy at the White House.

You've been promoting it in the crypto industry.

Maybe we can start off with telling us a bit about what's behind this and why

America needs to subscribe to this.

Michael: you know, I've been watching the industry for the past four years or so.

And, um, I think, uh, there's been a lot of confusion, a lot of

controversy, a lot of conflict and, uh, confrontation that was all unnecessary.

And it was unnecessary because of a sort of a lack of vision and a

lack of creativity, uh, amongst the policy makers and the participants.

So, for example, um, In a world where the only assets that exist

are securities and commodities.

And in a world where it's impossible for any innovator to issue a security,

then everything has to be a commodity.

And that means the token is a commodity, a currency is a commodity,

a tokenized security is a commodity, and a commodity is a commodity.

So what we had was people very confused thinking, well, is Bitcoin

a currency competing with the dollar?

Or is Bitcoin something different, a store of value competing with gold?

And then Is Bitcoin competing with, uh, TrumpCoin or any other token?

Uh, or not.

Uh, and what's the next Bitcoin?

And so I think the crypto industry was at odds.

A lot of people that want to be issuers of tokens are forced to go

through this Kabuki dance of pretending they're decentralized when they don't

really want to be decentralized.

What they want to do is access the capital markets and they,

they haven't had a way to do it.

And, uh, and we haven't had that discussion.

So, and my framework that I've laid out, and this is, this is

after hundreds of meetings and, and talking to people in the Senate and

the House and the SEC and the CFTC.

In the White House, every industry participant, all the Bitcoin investors,

all the crypto investors, all the crypto exchanges, all the policy makers, after

lots of, of, conversations, and after listening to every word uttered by

Gensler, by all the regulators, after listening to every minute of congressional

testimony, here's my opinion, my opinion is, the industry will move forward

in a cheerful, constructive way, Uh, with the greatest good done for the

greatest number of people on earth, if we define four new asset classes.

And they would be a digital token, a digital security, a digital

currency, and a digital commodity.

And those four new asset classes would rest atop three 20th century assets.

Securities, commodities.

And currencies, I don't think we really want to change the

definition of 20th century assets.

There's just too much inertia.

You can't change 100 years of securities case law and you don't want to change the

way the world trades, uh, commodities like silver and soybeans and, and trying to,

to deal with, uh, changing the definition of currencies issued by nation state.

That's, that's too, uh, jarring.

So the right way to handle this is simply to say.

we want to allow digital tokens to be issued by 400 million businesses, ideally

in four hours for 40 bucks, right?

And, uh, what's the use case of a digital token?

It's for capital creation and for innovation.

So let Trump coin be issued.

Let Katy Perry token or Joe Rogan coin or any token, whether it's a smart

contract token or a utility token or meme coin, Or maybe it gives me access

to, you know, to a music library on a website, or maybe it gets to be a hyper

complicated, you know, token or, and, or NFT, some digital utility or some right

that just stops short of being a security.

Uh, and there's 400 million people that want to do it and they want to

do it in four hours for 40 bucks.

And the reason that they can't issue a security to raise capital is because

securities take 40 million, an army of lawyers and accountants in four years.

And then you've got to pay 10 million a year to stay compliant.

And so, and, and even after you do all that, uh, securities would only

trade nine 30 to four on a few markets.

They don't trade globally worldwide, 24 seven.

So token solved the problem of, of giving capital markets access.

Two hundreds of millions of corporations.

And that's a profoundly important thing.

If you have no money and you want to start a business or you're a podcaster

and you somehow want to raise capital from your customers or from investors

to change your business, or if you want to innovate and say, I'm going to have

a podcast that has two layers of access, the free version and the tokenized

version, if you buy the token, you get the inside scoop and you get the comments.

And if you, if you take the free version, you don't.

So if you want innovation and you want capital, uh, creation, you need that, but

you need a legitimate path to do that.

And so that's missing, you know, the debate for the past four years was,

well, if you want to be an issuer, then you have to register with the SEC. And

then of course it's illegal to trade.

Okay, that doesn't work.

Or you can't be an issuer.

So if you pretend that you issued the token, but then you pretend that you're

not the issuer, you don't control it and it's decentralized, I won't sue you.

Well, that doesn't work either because the truth is 400 million entrepreneurs want

to issue the token, raise money overnight and use the money to do something good.

So we don't have a digital token asset class in the United States.

There isn't one recognized in the world.

We need one.

As soon as we have one, you'll see an explosion of innovation there.

Christine: How do you balance that innovation with consumer protection?

Because we did see this explosion of, you know, in the ICO boom, initial

coin offerings where innovators were able to create their own token, raise

money from their projects, but a lot of them, many, most of them ended up being

scams and people ended up losing money.

So that's where we see the regulators coming in and taking their hammer,

perhaps a little heavy handed.

Michael: what I'd point out there is we should just have a very principled

framework and the observation would be if you want to issue it, you have to actually

register that you're a person, right?

You can't have like an anonymous secret organization issue it

because there's no one to sue.

So an issuer should actually register the token.

They should lay out the utility.

They should, there should be a standard data structure.

Uh, it could be hosted by crypto exchanges and or by the industry and then when you

when you issue the token you say this is what the token this is who's issuing it

this is how many there are these are the rules this is the utility and then uh the

issuer ought to be civilly and criminally liable for fraud you know basically do not

lie cheat and steal And you're responsible for the damage you do that's that's just a

biblical Uh piece of guidance and I think that um You just let the free market, uh

to determine that because what will happen is if someone does defraud someone or

steal, they're going to get sued, right?

If you issue a token that results in the death of a person, you're

going to have a criminal manslaughter charge against you, right?

So there ought to be civil and criminal law.

Uh, and there ought to be consequences for the issuer, but I don't think,

and here's the point, I don't think you ought to have to take four years

and ask permission from a governmental agency before you issue the token.

If you, if you think about the metaphor, you don't have to wait

four years in order to post a tweet.

You don't have to wait four years in order to create a product.

to take a trip or drive a car.

Like, if I told you you had to wait four years and spend 40 million dollars

and then spend 10 million a year on an insurance policy before you can drive a

car because a government regulator wants to make sure that you don't hit some kid

crossing the street, nothing would move.

The truth of the matter is, if you hit a child crossing the

street, you are criminally liable.

And if you slam into someone's bakery, you're civilly liable.

So there are consequences to driving a car, but it seems utterly silly for

the government to say that everyone has to apply for permission to say

something or do something, uh, whatever that might be out of an abundance of

caution to, to protect the consumer.

So I think that you should just have consumer protection laws

just like every other product that is created in a free market.

What's your

Christine: so do you envision a new regulatory agency overlooking this

new set of digital asset classes?

Michael: no.

If you were to tweet something that's a lie right now, we

don't have an agency, right?

You could be sued for libel or slander.

If you, if you drive your car into me crossing the street,

we don't have a new agency.

And if you, if you start a bakery and if you bake muffins that have poison in them,

right, we don't have a new agency, right?

You don't need to create a new agency for consumer protection.

We've already got courts.

We've already got criminal statutes.

You're not allowed to kill people.

You're not allowed to steal from people.

Right.

So you don't need a new agency.

We've already got the law.

So my view on digital tokens is we ought to just let issuers issue the token and

hold them liable for the damage they do.

In egregious examples, there'll be criminal liability.

Someone will go to jail.

Christine: So it's the issuer that would have the liability because they're

doing, I guess the KYC of, uh, the people who wanna release these tokens.

Mm-hmm

Michael: the issuer would have liability, but not for KYC.

I think that with these digital assets, all the digital assets ought to circulate

freely, friction free at the speed of light, at the speed of a computer.

So.

A digital token, a digital currency, uh, a digital commodity and a

digital security all should circulate no KYC, no AML friction free.

That's how you're going to make the economy work, but the issuer

should have liability for fraud.

So if the issuer says, I'm selling 10 million, uh, you know, coin

desk tokens, and then you actually dump a billion coin desk tokens.

It's fraud, it might, you could call it wire fraud, you can

call it consumer fraud, right?

It's kind of very straightforward.

I don't think we need more.

And again, if CoinDesk, if CoinDesk issues a token that pays

off on the murder of me, right?

Well, that's, that's criminal act, right?

So maybe, maybe you're breaking a criminal law and you ought

to be liable as the issuer.

But I don't think you need any, any other agency, right?

And that's, that's the point of a digital token.

Yeah.

Uh, we should see 10 million tokens issued and by the way, you're right.

Most of them will fail, you know, just like, um, 10 million people tweet

every morning and most of the tweets don't go anywhere and 10 million new

mobile apps get created or, you know, millions of Chrome extensions and

millions of iPhone apps, most of them fail, most businesses fail, that's okay.

Like 99 percent can fail, 1 percent will be revolutionary

and they will change the world.

And I think the whole point of the capital market is people ought

to be free to innovate, right?

And, and the problem in a socialist environment where the government

decides is that no one has any freedom to do anything, right?

At some point when the government tells you, you can't create

a business, you can't speak.

You can't drive a car.

You can't move.

You can't create a product, right?

You end up with, uh, sort of a collapse.

So let me move on from that, though, because I mean, I don't think we

want to spend the entire interview talking about just digital tokens.

Um.

I think that if you go to digital currency, the real point is an issuer, a

corporation, whether it's Circle or Tether or a bank, ought to be able to issue a

digital asset that's backed by currency.

So if I want to sell a billion dollars of digital stablecoin, I

ought to have a billion dollars worth of currency in a bank.

It ought to be one for one backed, right?

And that's not the same as a stablecoin.

It's not UST backed by Luna.

Right?

It's not that would be a token, by the way, right?

If you create a token, which you purport to be stable at a dollar.

I mean, okay, you're kind of a fool to trust it.

But if I create a digital currency, then I issue 10 billion dollars and I buy

10 billion dollars of treasuries and it ought to be sort of a regulated entity.

And the issuer ought to be liable to the government and ought to

be liable to the buyer for fraud.

Right.

And that's kind of very straightforward, but then the, but then the digital

currency ought to circulate friction free at the speed of light.

And the benefit of that is that the stable coin industry will

go from 50 billion in the U.

S. to 10 trillion, and we will export 10 trillion dollars worth of U. S.

dollars to the rest of the world.

And probably everybody in Africa and everybody in Asia

will start using the dollars.

Maybe the Europeans will flip to the dollar, right?

It would be great for the world's reserve currency.

And so, uh, and it would be great for the 8 billion people on the

planet that have to use a defective currency, uh, as a medium of exchange

or a short term, uh, store of value.

Christine: So if the digital economy relies on stable

coins, why do we need Bitcoin?

Where does.

I know you, you're the master of the Bitcoin reserve strategy.

So tell me where, where that enters the picture.

Michael: Yeah, because if you think about money, uh, money decomposes

into currency and capital.

So, if you live in Argentina, and by law, you're required to pay your tax

bill in pesos, You're going to need ARS.

You're going to need local currency.

And, and if the currency is losing 20, 30, 40 percent of its value a year,

then you would hold that for four weeks.

Then, if you needed money for the next, uh, four, uh, four weeks to

four years, call that midterm money, you'd probably want to buy the dollar.

So you would have in your checking account USD.

You wouldn't hold, uh, Bolivar.

You wouldn't hold Naira.

You wouldn't hold any of the really weak collapsing currencies.

You wouldn't hold any Syrian or Afghan or or Iraqi currency.

Um, so in that case, you all want, you always want to hold the U. S. dollar.

But if you need to hold the money from four years to 400 years, there is no

institution or wealthy individual that would ever claim that the majority

of their assets are held in dollars.

They're holding capital assets and those capital assets are

split between three things.

They're either holding bonds.

You might be holding corporate bonds.

You might be holding treasury bonds or they're holding real estate.

You're probably owning a building or property or a home or some

other tangible physical asset.

Or you're holding private equity.

I own a company or public equity.

I have a portfolio of magnificent seven stocks or, uh, or S

and P index or something.

So think about all the wealthiest people in the world, Elon Musk, Jeff

Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, what percentage of their wealth is us dollars, right?

It's not even 1%, right?

So, uh, Bitcoin doesn't compete with the dollar.

Bitcoin competes with capital assets in the world.

And there are 450 trillion of those capital assets.

So think, think you own a Nigerian warehouse, you own a thousand

acres in Siberia, you own a private portfolio of Chinese stocks, right?

You own a bar of gold, right?

Why do you own these things?

Because you had to put your money somewhere.

So Bitcoin is replacing or competing with those things.

If you look at the, uh, the M2 money supply, I think.

The U. S. Dollar was showing is like 13, maybe 17 percent of that.

And the primary competitors, the dollar CNY Euro and JPY

yen, Euro and Chinese currency.

So as the stable coin, uh, as the digital currency backed by the dollar starts

to circulate, that number is going to go from 17 percent to 30%, right?

And, and what we're doing is we're really competing with other world currencies and

then The Bitcoin asset is less than 1%.

And as it grows, uh, if Bitcoin goes to 13 million a coin, then Bitcoin will go

from half a percent or 20, 30 basis points of the world's capital assets to 13%.

Of the world's capital assets, it will still compete with real estate equity

and bonds, but it will emerge as like a monetary index for long term money.

And

So,

that's why that's why that's why it's important to understand

this idea of digital commodity because the use case of a digital

commodity is not capital creation.

That's why all the altcoiners, that's why they don't get, if you have

zero money, you can't buy Bitcoin.

So you, if you have zero money, but you're a podcaster, you need

to issue a token to raise money.

So capital creation is, is a use case of a token.

Uh, the use case of a digital commodity is capital preservation.

And appreciation if you already have money and you want to, uh, store

your money for 100 years without worrying about risk, then you want

to put it in a savings account.

And so traditionally.

The king commodity as a long term money was gold, and what happens is gold

demonetizes silver, and silver demonetizes copper, and copper demonetizes glass

beads, and they all demonetize the giant stone coin of the Yap people, or bales

of tobacco, and so Gresham's Law says the strongest money wins, in the end

there can be just one, we're all going to go to the strongest Form of money.

So the strongest form of long term money, uh, which I'll call capital

is Bitcoin right now, and all these other assets are going to be traded

in for Bitcoin and there's no point creating a 2nd Bitcoin because there's

only 1 network that's going to win.

The rest are just going to collapse against it.

But, um, But the real point here is you want, uh, you want a commodity

to be a store of value, and it needs to be an asset without an issuer.

And so if you look at all these asset classes, what you have is digital tokens,

an asset with an issuer with very light.

Regulatory touch.

You can issue it overnight.

A digital currency is an asset with an issuer, but it's just

pegged to a nation state currency.

A digital security is an asset with an issuer, but it's really

tokenized stocks or bonds.

So it's like BlackRock releasing tokenized Apple shares or BlackRock

releasing tokenized S and P index.

It would be a token that circulates on a crypto exchange.

At the speed of light 24 seven globally, but it is, but does have an issuer.

And, uh, Bitcoin is special because it's an asset without an issuer.

And why would you want an asset without an issuer?

Because you're a company that doesn't want to trust any other company, or you're a

country that doesn't want to trust any other country, or you're a saver that

wants to store your money for 200 years.

And you don't expect any company to last 200 years and you don't expect

any government to last 200 years.

You just want your family to be rich forever.

And so Bitcoin appeals to the people that want immortal capital.

And you can see if you lay out this taxonomy, there's four

quadrants, you need them all.

You need short term money in order to, in order to make payments.

You need tokens to create capital.

You need to tokenize securities because otherwise, how do you

innovate or, or create more efficiency in the world capital markets.

And then you need a commodity to store and protect your capital.

And once you see all four of them, you realize they should all be

designated as new asset classes.

There ought to, the rule ought to be, uh, the issuers have an obligation

to lie, not lie, cheat and steal.

They're responsible for the damage they do.

The exchanges should have the ability to trade these things at the speed of light

with anybody or anything, any machine.

And then they should have obligations.

Don't lie, cheat and steal.

Don't, don't, uh, assume a conflict of interest.

And then the holders ought to have a right to self custody.

You ought to be able to, you ought, you ought to be able to own your

assets, custody, your assets, and transfer your assets freely.

So I think that, um, what we all agree with is there ought to be no.

AML KYC frictions on asset transfer, because that destroys the utility of

all these digital assets and to the extent that you want to enforce consumer

protections or investor protections, you should put the obligations on the issuers.

And, uh, and that way the economy starts to grow very, very rapidly.

Christine: in your plan, the U. S. should acquire 5 to 25 percent of the

total Bitcoin supply by 2035 to generate between 16 to 81 trillion dollars by 2045.

I'm wondering, What has been the reception of your plan at the White

House by U. S. President Donald Trump?

And I'd like to hear you talk about why this is a national security issue.

Michael: I think the last two weeks have been extraordinary, uh, for Bitcoin and

for the strategic Bitcoin reserve, because momentum is really building, uh, two

weeks ago, uh, there were three priorities or there were three things talked

about and the digital assets universe.

Uh.

A stable coin act, right?

The genesis, uh, sorry, the genius bill and, uh, and a bill to create

stable coins and issue them in the U.

S. And that really addresses the digital currency asset class.

And then there's discussion of a market structure bill, and that's to create

an entire digital assets framework, presumably to issue something akin to.

digital tokens or tokenized securities, digital securities.

And then there is the strategic Bitcoin bill or the Bitcoin act.

That was the third priority.

And it was a question mark of where that was in DC.

Uh, there was support, but, but people were wondering, um, what happened in

the past two weeks is the strategic Bitcoin reserve got elevated.

To a, to a primary, if not the primary priority with the executive order.

So the president created it.

And I think There are some very, uh, important things that happened.

On Thursday night, about a week ago, the President issued the Executive

Order, uh, creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and in the Executive

Order designated just Bitcoin to go in the reserve, said we should never

ever sell it, don't sell the Bitcoin, and then directed the Secretary of

Commerce and Treasury to look for budget neutral ways to acquire more Bitcoin.

That was the strongest endorsement of any asset, I don't know, in

a hundred years, I think, by a president of the United States.

I don't, you know, you could imagine if the president has said, we're gonna,

you know, I'm directing the government to acquire silver and never sell it.

And, and I want to buy more silver or pick any asset.

It would have been an extraordinary announcement.

I think, I think that was followed up by, uh, the Digital Assets Summit

and in the Digital Assets Summit, the President, uh, reiterated those

points and the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Commerce.

And small business administration all were present and reiterated their support.

That actually was quite amazing along with all of the industry

leaders being in one place at one time, you know, and of uniform mind.

I think Friday night after that summit, I think the most important thing said

in this industry in four years was said Friday night, and I think it

missed a lot of people's attention.

I don't think people really realize what happened.

Uh, David Sachs, the Crypto Czar, went on the All In podcast, and on the All In

podcast, uh, he said, um, unequivocally, That the U. S. government only recognizes

one crypto asset as being decentralized.

So what Sachs said was, Bitcoin is a decentralized asset, a store

of value, that's why it's in the strategic Bitcoin reserve.

It's the only one.

And so what you had was, was, um, a member of cabinet responsible for digital

assets policy, in essence, providing very clear guidance that Bitcoin is a digital

commodity, an asset without an issuer.

And that's the policy of the United States.

And the president of the United States and I think, uh, for four years, Gary

Gensler at the SEC implied that, you know, in 100 different ways implied that

Bitcoin is a commodity and nothing else is, but he implied it in, uh, in a fairly

obscure fashion that was, uh, that was kind of not very constructive because

he implied it by suing everybody else.

What you had here was, um, a different administration articulating it, but

in a constructive fashion, because what, what SAC said is Bitcoin

is the asset without the issuer.

If there are other crypto assets in the future that prove to be

decentralized, we will consider them when that, when the time comes.

So we're not, we're not dismissing the possibility there would be another

commodity, but right now we recognize one.

And our agenda is to provide a legitimate framework to issue digital currencies,

digital tokens, and digital securities.

And, of course, the President directed that that should

come to his desk by August.

He said, I want to see it by August.

He's actually said, in the first executive order, he said, within

six months, so by late July.

But basically,

the,

Christine: requirement that there is no issuer, I don't think any

cryptocurrency would really qualify,

Michael: one, no, one does.

Christine: Oh, except Bitcoin.

Michael: Bitcoin

Christine: What about any other ones?

Michael: Well, that's been the debate for, um, a decade, right?

And it's been a massive debate and a massive source of confusion, which is,

are there other digital commodities?

and the position of the previous administration, Christine, was you're

either a commodity, in which case you can trade on a crypto exchange legitimately.

Or you're a security in which case it's illegal.

We're going to sue you, shut you down or jail you, you see?

So we had a false dichotomy and, and, and that world where you're either

going to die economic, the best cases, economic death, and you're

blocked from the banking system.

By the way, everybody's blocked from the banking system, even

Christine: Sorry.

So, Micah, I'm just, if I'm understanding this, you don't think any other

cryptocurrency qualifies to be in a strategic reserve in the United States

other than Bitcoin because of its decentralization and it has no issuer?

Michael: I think there's only one universally acknowledged

digital commodity in the world.

Christine: Okay.

Michael: Right.

There's only one there's Bitcoin.

I've I've said that right.

There is no second

best.

I've implied that and said

that and I've spent 33 billion dollars based on that.

So, yeah, it was my view 4 and a half years ago.

There's 1 digital commodity.

But Christine, there's a more important point here.

Even if there was a second, third and fourth, like, let's take the fork

wars, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, even if you fork Bitcoin

and you maintain that's a commodity, they're all going to zero if the use

case is store of value or cap or money.

Right.

Because if you were to, if you were to fork Bitcoin and claim it's

decentralized, the the free market is going to pick the strongest network

and it's going to be monetized and everything else is going to zero.

So it doesn't matter from a practical point of view.

Um, I, I don't, my position is not that you couldn't theoretically

create another digital commodity.

For example, if China forked Bitcoin.

And declared China coin and then said, uh, it's, it's legal to mine China coin

and it's tax free to hold China coin and you can bank China coin in China.

In theory, the power of a nation state could create digital property

in China, just like I, for example, I acknowledge that real estate in China.

Is an asset without an issue, or I just don't want to own it.

Right like an American doesn't want to own Chinese real estate.

An American wouldn't want to own China coin, but in theory, if you

understand the economic theory of a crypto commodity, you could create it.

It's just very unlikely at this point, you can ever create a global money.

That's a crypto commodity because Bitcoin has.

A trillion dollars of smart money behind it.

And the next best thing doesn't have even 1%.

I mean, less than 1% of that.

Christine: I wanted to touch on the question about why is

this a national security issue?

Michael: in my speech, uh, at the National Press Club, uh, on Tuesday, I covered

this in a, in a 30 minute presentation, uh, for the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

And I would encourage anyone to go grab that.

It's on my X profile.

I posted it.

Um.

The point that I make is that there are four different metaphors, four different

ways to understand the Bitcoin network.

You can understand Bitcoin as digital capital.

It is the asset without the issuer.

If it's digital capital, then it's going to grow to a 200

trillion plus network over time.

And the value to the United States is anywhere from 3 trillion to 100 trillion

if the U. S. begins to acquire Bitcoin.

So, you know, as digital capital, it can negate or retire the national debt, or

it can convert us from owing 40 trillion to, to owning 40 trillion of net assets.

So it's a very powerful financial lever.

And the companies in the United States, like my company,

they're capitalizing on Bitcoin.

They're going to be worth 20 to 40 trillion just on their Bitcoin assets

if they continue to capitalize.

So understood as digital capital, Bitcoin is enriching the corporations

and the government itself, depending upon how much Bitcoin those entities own.

That's the first metaphor.

You know, the second metaphor is Bitcoin is digital property.

If you think of it as gold or cheese, nobody rents their cheese or mortgages

their cheese, but when you think of it as owning 100 acres in Manhattan,

if your family owned 100 acres of Manhattan 100 years ago, and you

owned it this year, and I asked you, what's your family doing with it?

You know, how are you going to pay your bills?

You wouldn't say, well, we're going to sell our property in Manhattan.

You would say, we're going to rent it.

We're going to develop a building on it, or we're going to borrow against it.

We're going to finance it.

And so you would generate billions and billions of dollars off of 100

acres of real estate in Manhattan without ever selling it its property.

And, and so Bitcoin as property means you will be able to rent it,

finance it, or build businesses on top of it in the cyber economy.

That would be worth 10 trillion to the United States in 2045 each year.

Right.

We could generate 10 trillion off of the digital property that

the United States buys in the

strategic Bitcoin reserve.

Christine: debt?

Michael: Well, you wouldn't be a national debt.

You would basically flip from being a net debtor to a net creditor,

and you would generate yield.

Um, That, and so that's a very, a very powerful idea, just like, you know, the,

the company that owns 100 billion dollars worth of real estate generates billions

and billions of dollars of rental income a year, or if I have 100 billion dollars of

capital, I can generate 5 billion dollars a year, just loaning the capital out.

Christine: Would that require the rest of the world to also

acknowledge the value of Bitcoin?

I mean, what if China and Russia and other countries, BRICS countries, decide to

create their own decentralized currency?

They say, you know, Bitcoin is too influenced by the Americans now.

Let's create our own

Michael: Yeah,

so the point is everyone that's tried it has failed and everyone that tries

it probably will fail against Bitcoin.

Um, Bitcoin is the winner.

It's the orange dwarf.

It's got the network effect, and it is the most powerful global capital

asset and global property assets.

So if you think about, uh, let's say, take every country in Africa, you

think there's a country in Africa that can launch the next Bitcoin that

won't collapse against Bitcoin now take every country in South America.

You know, is Brazil going to be able to, uh, launch an asset that you would want to

own more now take every country in Europe.

The euro is the second largest, largest currency and the

best currency in the world.

Other than the dollar, 99 percent of the demand for digital currency

in Europe is for the dollar.

Okay, so the Europeans can't even compete against the dollar.

Will the Russians be able to launch something?

No.

Will the Chinese?

Why?

Nobody in China wants to own anything in China, Christine.

How do I know that?

Because there's a law, right?

The Chinese make it illegal to move more than 50, 000 of

capital a year outside of China.

If the Chinese drop the capital control, all of the capital in

China would flow out of capital.

Sorry, out of China.

And so, will be geopolitical jostling, but Bitcoin is already the winner.

It's reached escape velocity, and if the U. S. government begins to

acquire it aggressively, Not only are they a beneficiary, but they will

force every other country on earth to adopt Bitcoin as the global capital.

In fact, what will really happen is the Japanese, the Canadians, the

Mexicans, the Brazilians, all the Africans, all the Europeans will

immediately Well, not immediately.

They will inevitably, is the right word, inevitably begin to convert their

physical and financial capital into digital capital on the Bitcoin network.

It becomes a fait accompli.

They almost can't stop it, right?

So it's, it's one of those, uh, geopolitical moves that when you embrace

the network, you force all of your allies first to adopt it, and then

all your enemies have to adopt it.

there's four different metaphors for Bitcoin.

There's digital capital.

There's digital property.

The third important, uh, important metaphor is it's a digital energy

network and the A. I. economy is going to be built on digital energy

by moving energy money at the speed of light at the speed of a computer.

It's 100 trillion dollar economy.

There is one digital energy network.

If you own it, if you control it, you control and participate

in that 100 trillion economy.

If you don't, you're locked out of the economy.

The AIs are going to think a million times a second, and they're

going to want to trade a million times a second with each other.

You can't do it without a digital monetary network, and that'll be built

on Bitcoin as a settlement network.

So if the entire future of the banking system And the digital commerce

system and the AI economy, it's all going to be based upon digital money,

digital energy, digital capital.

And so that's important.

And then the fourth metaphor is, it's a digital defense system

because the, the measure of power in the, in cyberspace is the exahash.

If you want to create a system that can't be, uh, corrupted.

censored, tampered with, or hacked by an AI or by another computer.

You need raw power combined with the power of cryptography, a wall of

digital energy or encrypted energy.

And so if I wanted to send 10 billion into a war zone, the only way to do it

Is with Bitcoin if I want to lock down a cyber system against cyber attack where

I want to authenticate it and and make a tamper proof what you want is public

private key cryptography embedded into the Bitcoin blockchain backed by 20 gigawatts

of electricity 850 X a hash no one can crack that right and we have a situation

today where Satoshi could prove to you in one second that they are in possession

of 80 billion worth of capital by simply signing a message with their private key.

That has profound cyber security, uh, implications for the country.

So when you put them all together, right, digital capital, digital property,

digital, you know, energy and digital defense, what you can see is that you

either going to own cyberspace and owning cyberspace is, is owning the asset

and controlling the network, you know, controlling cyberspace or your enemy does.

And if you lose control of your airspace, you get bombed back

to the Stone Age in one week.

You lose the country.

If you lose control of the sea lanes, you lose the country.

If you lose control of cyberspace, not only can you not send money between

New York and Tokyo, you can't send money between New York and Chicago.

You can't even send money between your computer and the computer in the same

room next to you in a secure fashion.

So, so, in this case, the reason this is important to U. S. digital supremacy is.

The future economy is digital intelligence, and it's going

to need to move digital energy protected by digital power in order

to engage in digital commerce.

and, and, uh, Bitcoin is that digital energy network, and that's why it's in

the best interest of the U. S. to own it.

Christine: You're also calling for ending hostile and unfair tax policies.

And there has been word of a zero capital gains tax being applied to Bitcoin

and other American cryptocurrencies, according to Eric Trump, the son

of U. S. President Donald Trump.

Wondering what your thoughts are in regard to this.

Michael: if you had a tax, uh, a tax that basically taxed everyone when they

started a fire or they used electricity.

Or they, um, or they put gasoline in a car, you'd pretty much tax yourself back

to a stone age barter society, right?

It'd be pretty stupid.

And so taxing digital power, um, you know, which is, uh, which is the

current tax treatment of Bitcoin miners.

We actually tax Bitcoin when it's mined, not when it's sold.

We're actually, it's kind of like, Okay.

Taxing, um, it's taxing an entrepreneur when they come up with

a new idea before anybody buys it.

It's, uh, it's pretty crippling.

So I think we have hostile, unfair, irrational tax policies

that impair the industry.

I think clearly, uh, we want to change those.

I think that we have blocked the industry from the banking system.

That's kind of foolish.

Um, if you prevent banks from banking Bitcoin, it means the Bitcoin

eventually will go to whichever bank in the world is willing to bank it.

Uh, All of the crypto crashes, the crypto winner, the failures of FTX

and Genesis and, and Three Arrows and, you know, BlockFi and Celsius,

all of those failures were because the regulators prevented legitimate.

Banks, well run banks from custodying Bitcoin, and so they drove everybody to

crypto cowboys offshore that were run by entrepreneurs or shadow banks, and,

and, uh, if they simply allowed actual banks, if they allowed public companies

like Apple or Google, or if they allowed big banks like JP Morgan and Morgan

Stanley to handle these assets, we wouldn't have had those crypto crashes.

We wouldn't have had those failures.

Those people wouldn't have lost their money.

And so what we want is, uh, is supportive regulation.

We want to unwind all of the hostile, you know, regressive policies,

which prevent big tech and big banking and big insurance and big

finance from handling these assets.

And then we want to roll forward the path of legitimacy.

If you do that, the industry grows by a factor of 100 and the risk to the consumer

and the investor falls by a factor of 100.

It's fairly straightforward.

Christine: You've said on plenty of occasions that Bitcoin in price.

It's going to go up forever in your latest presentation.

I, I saw that by 2445, it'll be about 13 million Bitcoin.

That's the base case and 49 million in a bull case and 3 million in a bear case.

When will Bitcoin in your view, or will anything derail

that trajectory in your view?

Michael: No, I don't think so.

I think that, um.

When I gave that speech, it was Bitcoin Nashville in July of 2024, and

I gave those forecast and obviously I, you know, I gave them, there's

a model Bitcoin 24 is published.

It's on GitHub.

Just go Google it, download it and you can plug in all your own assumptions

about inflation and innovation.

The two big drivers of Bitcoin price going up are innovation and inflation, right?

Bitcoin is going to go up because capital is going to be created by technology.

And as the world gets richer, the capital is going to have to find a home.

And Bitcoin is going, price is going to appreciate because

there'll be more currency.

More dollars, more pesos, more rubles, more everything.

And the price is going to accretiate because people are going to sell

their 20th century physical assets and financial assets and the like

in order to buy digital assets.

And that trend is going to accelerate as people get educated because why

would anybody want to own a warehouse in the middle of Africa when you could

own the equivalent amount of Bitcoin?

They're all going to trade when they can.

It's just going to be a question of supportive institutions give me a safe way

to buy a billion dollars of it and then supportive regulations and then education.

So these are all things that are simple to predict and that was

my prediction in July of 2024.

But look what happened since then.

Right?

Uh, since then we had, uh, a red sweep.

You had a pro Bitcoin Congress, pro Bitcoin Senate, pro Bitcoin

House, pro Bitcoin President.

You have every cabinet member, or nearly every cabinet member,

owns Bitcoin as pro crypto.

They're all very supportive and, uh, now you have a supportive

Secretary of the Treasury.

You have, uh, one executive order, you know, directing that

we create a vibrant digital assets industry in the United States.

You have a second executive order creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

You have a huge amount of momentum.

Uh, what I've seen is, uh, A sea change over the past 16 weeks.

Um, most conventional investors and traditional investors everywhere in

the world that were, uh, not interested or afraid of this asset class.

They have all flipped their view, um, to think to being very curious.

So I've been invited to conferences in South America with 100 wealthiest

families for the first time.

I've been invited to speak to all the Middle Eastern sovereign

wealth funds for the first time.

I've been invited to speak at Morgan Stanley's tech conference,

the most prestigious one in the tech industry of tech investors.

For the first time, I've been invited to speak at CPAC, the Conservative

Political Action Committee.

Um, for the first time, I've been invited to the White House to speak

to the President of the Cabinet.

For the first time, right?

Uh, and so, there's a whole, that speech that I gave on Tuesday at the

National Press Club, on, uh, you know, there were two senators on stage.

With me for the 1st time and so what you have is an avalanche of institutional

interest, uh, by mainstream, um, policy makers, business leaders, investors,

and if you roll the clock back, uh, 16 months, none of it existed.

The number of institutional investors invested in spot Bitcoin ETFs went

from 6 to 3, 300 over 12 months.

So I would say that, uh, institutional adoption is clearly afoot.

Uh,

all of the regulators in the world will talk about digital assets

and they'll talk about Bitcoin.

They won't do anything until Washington, D. C. financial regulators, uh, Take a

position and so the future of digital tokens, digital currencies, digital

securities and digital commodities will all emanate from Washington D.

C. and every other financial regulator and every banking regulator

everywhere in the world will follow.

And I'm not just talking our allies, the Brazilians, the Emirates, the Europeans.

Our enemies, or our quasi enemies, or our frenemies, the Chinese,

the Russians, everyone is going to copy the taxonomy and, and the, the

principles that are set in the United States And I, I, I'm not speculating.

I'm telling you from first person knowledge because I talked to them.

I'm saying I talked to people in South America and they say our banks will not

embrace this until the U. S. does it?

And so the entire industry has been frozen.

Up until November 5th and on November 6th, we thought things might get better,

but if you look at the, at the, uh, parade of positive actions that are

good for the digital assets industry, good for the crypto industry, good

for Bitcoin, I think, I think it's exceeded everybody's expectations.

I don't think anybody expected, you know, every member of the cabinet

to be pro crypto pro Bitcoin.

Every member of the cabinet, there isn't any, you know, it's one thing to

say, well, we elected a president that stopped, uh, that stopped suing us, right?

Ended the, ended the war on crypto, but we went from a war on crypto to

every crypto enforcement action getting unwound day by day to now a very, very

positive, not just positive, uh, in a, uh, in an ambiguous way, right?

Positive in a decisive way.

We're going to do this.

We're going to do this this week next week We're going to do this in six months.

You better do this Right.

Uh, that I think is a, is a reason that everybody in the industry ought to be

feeling, uh, very optimistic because these are the most auspicious developments

in the last 12 weeks that have happened in the entire history of the industry.

Christine: or it could be a concern.

If in 4 years, we have a new administration that

thinks very differently.

Michael: I'm not so concerned about that.

I think that, uh, Pandora's box has been opened, uh, and if you look at these

developments, uh, they tend to be one way just like a hash function is, is one way.

There are certain things that once you've done them, you can't undo them.

Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

I'll give you an example.

When the spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January of 2024.

That opened the entire floodgate and now 3, 300 institutions own this and

we went from nothing to 150 billion.

You can't undo that.

You know, a future president or head of the SEC could never say in four years,

there'll be 500 billion in these things.

They can't say, well, I just decided that Bitcoin isn't a commodity anymore.

It's just, it's just too much in one direction.

Uh, and once banks start to bank Bitcoin, when Bitcoin spreads through the banking

system and there's a trillion dollars of, of digital capital in the banking

system, it won't just be in the U.

S. It's a virus.

And so the virus spreads.

And in this case, that means you're going to have hundreds of banks and

thousands of banks and trillions of dollars that are held by a billion people.

Okay, so a new president gets elected and maybe they don't like Bitcoin, you know,

you can't take a trillion dollars out of this system, you know, so it's kind of

like a new president saying, I just, you know, don't think that we should have

the flu, you know, or I don't think bunny rabbits should, you know, be able to

romp across the continent of Australia.

You're not gonna put, you know, the genie back in the bottle.

These things are viral.

Isothermal, there're, it's a fire in cyberspace.

A cyberspace, and it spreads very rapidly.

Christine: There is a question I wanted you to reflect on generally on government.

You know, in the United States, we have these short term time horizons

that change with administrations.

We have lawyers, businessmen, entertainers as presidents, whereas in

other countries, they have engineers.

They have 25 year time horizons.

Is that a limitation of American government?

I

Michael: I think, uh, if you read the Bitcoin Act, uh, put toge put forward

by, uh, Senator LAIs and Congressman Baggage, they, they specify a 20 year

minimum holding period for bitcoin.

And, and the President of the United States has said, never sell your Bitcoin.

I think those two utterances by the politicians most heavily involved

here are incredibly visionary and auspicious and principled.

And so, I actually believe that, uh, the United States has some very

principled leadership that has an ambition to make this nation great.

Not make this nation great for four years.

I think I think the goal is to make this nation great throughout the

21st century and and thereafter.

And I think that's, that's the promise of, uh, of Bitcoin.

Digital capital is the promise of digital assets.

It's, you know, and I laid out in my strategy.

I said, we can create 100 trillion dollars of wealth for this nation.

We need we need it.

Principled leadership.

We need a rational digital assets framework and and we need to remove, you

know, crippling restrictions that prevent innovators in the economy from from moving

forward as fast as they possibly could.

Christine: wanted to go back to earlier this year.

I was at your Bitcoin New Year's Eve party celebrating Bitcoin surpassing 100, 000.

It was a peak moment for many in the Bitcoin space.

It was really interesting going through Ville Vecchia, your, your, uh, home.

I saw Bitcoin historical artifacts.

There was a laptop by Druidians from 2009, uh, a lot of nautical artifacts.

And a lot of this has to do, I suppose, the nautical aspects,

uh, I guess your history, Of traveling exploring and whatnot.

Um, I was wondering what your family upbringing was like.

Michael: my father's a career Air Force non commissioned officer.

And retired as a Chief Master Sergeant, uh, the highest enlisted

rank in the U. S. Air Force.

I lived on Air Force bases my entire life.

So as a military family, a military upbringing, we

traveled all around the world.

I lived in New Zealand.

I lived in, uh, Japan.

I lived on a bunch of Air Force bases in the Midwest.

I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Uh, and, uh, I went to school at Patrick Air Force Base at Satellite

Beach for a while and eventually at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where

I was at, where I was in high school.

So I would say, uh, fairly straightforward, um, Air Force family,

Air Force brat, they would say.

Um, Then I got an Air Force scholarship and I went to MIT, uh, on an Air

Force scholarship, uh, and I was commissioned as, um, a second lieutenant

of the United States Air Force.

I ended up serving the Air Force Reserve and I ended up as a

captain in the Air Force Reserve.

And so, so I would say a lot of my upbringing had that

Air Force, uh, root in it.

Christine: Does that Air Force upbringing also talk about or touch upon, I don't

know, some thrill seeking element, some adrenaline rush in your attraction

to, to Bitcoin and the ups and downs of volatility associated with it?

Michael: I think that, uh, the Air Force is elevates the, uh,

and idealizes the engineer, right?

I mean, the Air Force is all about engineered aircraft and, and technology.

So technology is a pretty, uh, and pretty important principle in the Air Force.

And I think it gave me, um, a lot of appreciation for, for flight, for

engineering, um, for Aerospace design for spaceships, uh, and that's why when

I went to MIT, I, I studied aerospace engineering and spaceship design.

And so that, uh, gave me an appreciation for systems

engineering and systems engineering.

You study higher order systems, feedback systems, servo mechanisms,

uh, cybernetic systems and, uh, and obviously mechanical engineering.

Civil engineering, you know, all sorts of engineering, electrical engineering.

And so when I finally, uh, discovered Bitcoin, I think I appreciated it

as an engineered system, right?

It's full of, full of, uh, really, really, uh, powerful, elegant

engineering structures that made it.

Uh, that made it stable, right?

The, something like the difficulty adjustment is a first order negative

feedback loop, a servo mechanism.

It's the same principle you need to make a steam engine work, by the way.

It's the same principle that pops up in all sorts of machines.

It was, and it's a principle in electrical engineering, and it's a principle in all

kind of non linear dynamic simulations.

You need a first order feedback loop.

Um, but then, uh, the other thing I realized is, Bitcoin is

thermodynamically sound money, and it's a thermodynamically sound network.

Um, the idea of thermodynamically sound is very, uh, important

to an aeronautical engineer.

Because in order to create airplanes, you have to, you normally do all the modeling

and engineering based upon assumptions of, uh, adiabatic systems and adiabatic

system is a, is a sealed closed system and you, and in a sealed closed system

where energy doesn't leave or enter the system, you can solve all the problems.

And so they say, assume an adiabatic system, And it turns out

that if the, if the system is not adiabatic, if it's not sound and

sealed, you can't solve any problem.

And so the real genius of Satoshi was to create, uh, a

thermodynamically sound monetary system.

And, you know, if I give you the example, I give you a bathtub,

there's a leak in it, or I give you a ship, there's a leak in it.

Or if I give you a plane and there's a hole in the fuselage.

Yeah, you know that like that's always the theme of the horror movies the titanic

Or or the the window got blown out in the airplane explosive decompression

All of the catastrophes are because you don't have an adiabatic system

or thermodynamically sound system.

The economic catastrophe, that's the analogy here, is hyperinflation

or the collapse of a currency.

And so, all of my engineering background at MIT was how to design

systems that are sound, that work.

A ship that flies, and a ship that doesn't, sorry, a plane that

flies, a ship that doesn't sink.

Right.

You see them in my house when you see the ships, the ships that

don't sink, the planes that fly.

Uh, Satoshi was a truly genius, a genius engineer, but you could also say

Satoshi was simply a competent engineer.

Satoshi designed a monetary system using semiconductors, public

private key, cryptography, and the internet that was possible for the

first time, sometime around 2009.

It was impossible during the time period of Hayek or von Mises, when all the

Austrian economists wrote about this, they didn't have the technology to design a

thermodynamically sound monetary system.

So they use gold, which was an imperfect network and an imperfect asset.

It's kind of like Da Vinci and Michelangelo, or maybe Newton, you know,

and Leibniz, they're genius scientists and they want to design an airship.

But if you don't have an internal combustion engine and petroleum,

you can't make an airplane.

The Wright brothers had petroleum and a motor, an internal combustion engine,

and they could create an airplane.

Maybe not so theoretically genius, but practically they made us fly.

So Satoshi took all of the math.

All of the engineering, all of the monetary theory that came in the hundreds

of years or thousands of years before him or her and created perfect money.

And so I think my background.

You know, drove me to go to MIT.

My education was as an engineer and as a systems engineer, but by the

way, there's another important point.

Aeronautical engineers are probably the greatest of all systems engineers,

because to create an airplane, you have to be, you have to master civil

engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, you have to master

electrical engineering, stability.

And.

If you get anything wrong, the plane crashes and burns and you can't,

for example, you have to build an airplane with aluminum, even though

the best material is steel, because steel is so heavy, the plane crashes.

You can never fly a steel plane.

And so you have to make a compromise.

And the compromise is I have a plane that flies, but it's not as strong as steel.

When you're a civil engineer, you use steel, but the building doesn't fly.

So, if you apply that to money and Bitcoin, Bitcoin was an

engineered system with compromises.

Like, well, why can't you just clear the transactions every five seconds?

Well, because it's not stable, right?

If you want it to be stable, then you have to clear the

transactions every 10 minutes.

And so, well, why can't you just have infinite block space?

Well, because then it, then, uh, it's not stable over time

and the security collapses.

Well, Satoshi understood that if you want it to be stable in time and space, there

was a limit to what you could achieve.

Just like, well, why can't I just have a hundred story building

that flies across the ocean?

Well, a civil engineer wouldn't know why you can't, but an aeronautical

engineer would be able to explain exactly why you can't fly 100

story building across the ocean.

Right?

And so my background, I think, caused me to look at Bitcoin and appreciate

the beauty of the engineering.

And whereas someone that doesn't have an engineering background

might say, well, I'm just going to hack together something, which is

smarter, faster, quicker and easier.

And you end up with all the other altcoin experiments.

But what they don't do is they don't appreciate the thermodynamic, physical,

mathematical, and systems limitations over time and space that a really

good system engineer would understand.

And, uh, and so I think that that all brought me to where I am today and it

caused me to look at this thing and say, oh, my Satoshi created the perfect.

monetary network, you know, for the world.

And it's like someone gives you steel, you want to build Manhattan, someone gives you

aluminum, you want to build an air force.

and and so I see Bitcoin and I sell perfect money, what am I going to build?

And, uh, you know, so far we've taken our company, you know, with a billion

dollar market cap and built it into an 80 billion company just by building

off of what I view as crypto steel.

Christine: while I was at your place, I saw one of your super yachts, it's called

the Usher, and someone there said it referred to one of your greatest failures.

So I wanted, I was curious, why would you name a ship after one of your greatest

failures and what you learned from that?

Michael: back in the mid nineties, I bought up a bunch of domain names

and names like Usher and Hope and Michael and Mike and Speaker and Angel.

And voice and strategy, because I thought one day you could build businesses

on these because they're great words in the English language and everybody

knows how to spell them and say them.

And they're very powerful brands and I had some singles and some doubles,

you know, I launched some things.

I sold voice for 30 million and I sold angel for 100 million.

And then we launched alarm.

com and that's a multi billion dollar business.

But then I launched a business called Usher.

On the Usher, um, on the Usher domain, and it was going to be a

mobile authentication application.

So, it was a mobile app that was multi factor authentication that you

could use to seamlessly log into a website or authenticate a transaction.

Um, whether it's a financial transaction or a ticketing transaction.

So, it was this, uh, it was this idea of, uh, You know, public private key

cryptography in a consumer app, uh, because you couldn't rely on and we

wanted to replace passwords, right?

Passwords are garbage.

Everybody knows passwords are garbage.

Um, you could almost think of it as like, it's a software version of

a signing device, like a Bitcoin, a Bitcoin wallet or hardware

wallet, but we did it back in 2012.

We didn't have the distribution channel and it turned out that it was an idea

a bit ahead of its time and ultimately what happened was Apple just kind

of built login with Apple into their iPhone and then Microsoft issued

Microsoft Authenticator and they just gave it for free to a hundred million

businesses and Microsoft Authenticator has got like one one hundredth of the

functionality of Usher and But what I learned, right, what did I learn?

Well, first of all, it failed, right?

I thought it was going to be a multi billion dollar thing.

And I named the yacht Usher while I was launching it.

I didn't name it after it failed.

I named it because Usher was mobile identity.

And I thought it was kind of cute to name a yacht after my mobile identity.

And it made a good, uh, a good name.

And you can read the sign from a long way away.

So it's a good handle for a boat for safety reasons and practical reasons.

But what I learned from the, uh, endeavor is, you know, sometimes you

can overthink things like, uh, you're better off, the winner in that market

was Microsoft and Apple or Google, like people log in with Chrome, they log in

with Apple, they log in with, uh, with Microsoft Authenticator, the winner

is the simple brainless idea that has just enough functionality, replace the

password, That you have the distribution channel for you can you can jam it down a

channel to a billion people or bundle it.

And, uh, we were like the innovator with this, you know, Swiss army knife

that did everything, but we didn't have the distribution channel and it

was a little bit before it's time.

So it's, you know, I would say generally, Christine, maybe one of the things that

made me appreciate Bitcoin is I had, you know, I probably came up with 20 ideas

that I thought were the best idea ever.

You know, I went through this period, you know, from your thirties to your fifties,

you're like, I'm going to invent this.

I'm going to invent that.

I'm going to invent this.

And whenever you invent something, you think it's the best idea ever.

And then, then you don't know it isn't until the market tells you it isn't.

And the market's going to tell you, you know, most of them will fail.

A couple may achieve a hundredth or a tenth of what you thought.

Occasionally you get, you find a really good idea, but you shouldn't be so proud.

that you're not willing to embrace somebody else's idea if it's better.

So the great irony, right?

The great irony of life.

And Elon Musk says, he says, sometimes the most ironic outcome

is the most likely outcome.

The irony of life is after 30 years in business, after I created 20

ideas and after some succeeded and a lot of them failed, my biggest

success is somebody else's idea.

And I wasn't even looking for it.

I was, you know, I was kind of kicked in the back by a golden horseshoe.

If you will.

And so during the lockdowns, we had a problem and we discovered Bitcoin and

that was Satoshi's idea and we kind of just grabbed it, you know, defensively

because the choice was either that or a quick death or a slow death.

So it was really like a life raft or a, you know, life preserver.

And then it became an opportunity.

And then it became a strategy and then all of a sudden in the past 12 months, we

realized it was a really good business.

We could build a really good business on it.

And it wasn't our idea and I didn't invent it.

But the truth is, we made 100 X as much money for our shareholders and our

employees and our and everybody involved as all the things that I invented.

And so.

Yeah, that yacht behind.

The yacht kept the name Usher.

It reminds me of, of something that I thought was a brilliant idea,

but it didn't turn out that way.

And it reminds you that even when you think you're 100 percent right, you know,

it's quite possible that you're not.

And you probably ought to have the humility to appreciate other

people's thoughts on the matter.

Christine: What advice would you give to a younger version of yourself?

Michael: first of all, embrace the new platforms of your generation that

are going to change the world, right?

So, so don't do what your parents did or your grandparents did because they

might have been insanely successful.

And all your role models may be insanely successful.

But, but, uh, they did something which made sense in