The CEO Pioneering The Bitcoin Mining Council - Part 1

Now next guest is just hosted a meeting between Elon Musk and the top Bitcoin miners in North America

who have now agreed to form a council to put sustainability first.

Michael Zayla, the CEO of MicroStrategy, joins us now.

Michael is always fantastic to have you on the show.

We can talk about that.

Just put it into perspective.

What do we need to understand about some of the choppiness that we've seen in the last three weeks?

Also.

You know, Bitcoin is maturing as an asset class.

So if you look at it over the past 15 months, the liquidity in Bitcoin is up by a factor of seven, seven hundred percent.

The price is up by seven hundred percent on May 18th, 13 and a half billion dollars in the spot market traded on the

Binance exchange and the price closed seven acts more than it was on Black Thursday, which was the biggest trading day of 2020.

So Bitcoin, the question's always been, will institutions embrace it?

They have embraced it.

And although you can write a negative headline if you just focus upon the price movement between

Saturday of one week and Tuesday of the next week, if you actually look out over a 12 month time period,

the story is seven hundred percent increase in liquidity and seven hundred percent increase in price.

You're saying volatility is the price you pay for investing in nascent technology?

Yeah, we either can have a stable stagnation or we can have vitality accompanied with volatility.

And so yeah, there's some volatility, but the assets perform 10X better than equity for a decade and a hundred X better than gold for a decade.

And so I'd much rather have the volatility and the vitality that comes with it.

It's a longer term investment because I guess for most people, they can't take that level of volatility.

Their fund performance can't take that level of volatility.

But if you look at it over a longer term horizon, the return relative to other assets,

be it bonds or equities is better.

That's your message.

You know, Jeff Bezos had conviction in Amazon and Amazon had massive volatility over the 20 years.

And yet he never wavered in his belief.

And I think that Bitcoin is the same thing.

It's a belief in a digital monetary network that's going to empower billions of people with economic freedom around the world.

If we pay the price of some volatility on that journey, it's a small price to pay.

You know, there will be those that look at this and say,

but give me give me the investment case relative to other next generation cryptocurrencies in that regard.

What's superior about Bitcoin protocol relative to others?

Bitcoin is the dominant crypto asset network.

And if you want a long duration asset that's going to last for 100 years,

you need to completely decentralize it and make it permissionless.

And you need to also thermodynamically embed it in the firmament of the world.

And so the architecture of Bitcoin ensures that it will be embedded in the reality of the laws of physics

because it uses energy.

And it also ensures that it will be politically supported because there are actually facilities and political jurisdictions that are supported by those governments.

And in the absence of the Bitcoin mining operations, which provide security to this asset,

we wouldn't have the political support.

Nor will we have the link to physical reality and thermodynamic soundness necessary for us to make long-term bets over the course of years and decades.

It's a long time since I studied thermodynamics.

I was just trying to process all that means in terms of Bitcoin, but use the word dominant here.

Do you mean just in terms of size and scale?

Because to go back to your point about.com stocks,

when everyone thought Yahoo was going to be the winner and actually in the end, it was Google and Amazon.

So how do you know you're betting on the right horse at this moment?

Well, Amazon is the fastest network to grow to a trillion dollars in market value in the history of the world.

Yeah, but then we thought Yahoo was going to be the winner.

That's my point.

We didn't know back then necessarily that Amazon was going to be the winner.

I just, I don't understand today while we can be so sure that Bitcoin is the winner.

I'm just asking.

There's not really helped me understand.

There's no historic precedent for a network that got to hundreds of billions of dollars that was 50 times bigger than its next best competitor ever failing.

I mean, you could have predicted Google Facebook, Amazon, Apple, as being successful by 2010,

because they had already dominated their markets, but they had a decade of growth ahead of them.

Bitcoin is more dominant today than any of those companies were when they started their run.

Are you saying the technology superior to?

It is.

The architecture is superior.

If what you want to do is save money and give it to your children and your grandchildren,

then you need something that's sound and sound starts with thermodynamically sound.

So the proof of work architecture is by far the best architecture to design something that will be decentralized and secure

and maintain its integrity over long periods of time.

We can make something more energy efficient, but the price we pay is we give up the political support of the jurisdictions that run the mining.

And we give up the thermodynamic soundness and we make it a permission network where someone and somebody can decide who gets to participate.

Bitcoin is open sound money for the entire world.

Everybody gets to participate.

It's rules, but there's no rulers.

And that makes a big difference.

So that's interesting.

So that leads me to the conversation that you had with Elon Musk and some of the biggest Bitcoin miners,

because there were a lot of people after that that said, hey, we weren't part of the conversation.

You're a huge player because you have so much Bitcoin on your balance sheet and are open about it.

Elon Musk can move prices.

Obviously the miners are a vital part of this as well.

Michael, what does that represent?

What does that call represent and how is that going to change the industry?

And would you do things differently if you could?

Elon believes in the power of sound money and he believes in the power of a crypto asset,

not working. He believes in Bitcoin.

He also is enthusiastic about making the world green and promoting sustainable energy.

The Bitcoin miners believe the same thing.

I believe the same thing.

We want to be the good guys here.

So we met with Elon in order to understand how we could do that together better.

And we wanted to communicate what's really going on in the Bitcoin mining world.

And I think the most important thing to know about Bitcoin mining is

it's the most valuable use of sustainable energy in the world right now.

There is no better application or more valuable application for sustainable energy than Bitcoin.

It's also the largest energy recycler on earth today.

And people don't know that.

I mean, the third thing they don't know is that the most energy efficient major industry in the

world today. Nobody knows that.

And we need to communicate that.

And finally, it's a very sophisticated industry, but it's getting 10 times more energy efficient

in the coming few years.

And so those four stories, they're not out there in the mainstream media.

We wanted to talk with Elon about how to communicate our message.

And then also talk about how we could become more transparent in the energy usage

and the efficiency of the Bitcoin mining network.

Because it's a great thing that's going on.

We want to share it with the world.

There will be proponents of other crypto assets that will be screaming as they watch this

interview if I don't push back on some of those.