It's Clear That Bitcoin is Winning, Gold is Losing

I was joined as Michael Seller,

Microstrategy Chairman, and CEO.

We constantly talk about the regulatory overhang Michael,

and we've got some new data points on Wednesday,

you know, Republicans and Democrats have different views,

but all of it looks like there will be more scrutiny.

You continue, can I call you a stacker?

Microstrategy is a stacker.

You added what 9,000 coins in the...

Ginkestacker.

Ginkestacker.

You added 9,000 coins.

I think you're up to about $7 billion worth.

I don't know if I did the math on today's price,

but out of the entire market cap of $7.4 billion,

for a while, in the mid-60s,

everyone was up.

Everyone had made money.

That's not the case anymore.

Would you stack right now?

Would you wait for a further pullback?

How do you do it?

We're going to keep stacking forever, Joe.

Forever.

Yeah, the issue is crypto is going mainstream.

You know, we hit all-time highs last week,

and now there's volatility.

Inflation's gone mainstream.

And so what's causing the volatility?

The volatility is driven by exchange leverage,

the altcoins, some security tokens,

DeFi, wash trading, the novelty of crypto,

and the excessive growth, right?

And that doesn't surprise me.

I think people have been waiting for clarity

from regulators in over the past month.

We got a lot of clarity.

The report on stablecoin is telling the world

that they want stablecoins issued by FDIC-insured banks.

The Crenshaw report is telling the world

that DeFi, as we know, it will not continue.

The SPOT ETF denial report is telling the world

that the regulators want crypto exchanges

to meet national securities exchange rule and standards.

And the infrastructure bill is putting into question

staking and DeFi.

Now, there's one thing that's for certain, Joe.

The world wants two things.

The world wants a digital dollar, US dollar,

and they don't want a hundred billion of it.

They want 10 trillion of it or 20 trillion.

The Chinese want it, the Africans want it,

the Asians want it.

They want it from FDIC-insured bank or like.

And the world wants a digital asset

that's a store of value.

And Bitcoin is universally accepted

as that common property store of value.

So those two things are clear.

Everything else is marquee.

The market's trying to sort out what all this means.

We're getting a lot of data points,

I said that earlier, about inflation too.

And gold made a move, finally.

It made some people are surprised it hasn't made more of a move.

And I think you can go back.

I don't know, can you go back a decade, probably,

and we're a little changed.

Is it your view that Bitcoin has replaced or will replace,

or is in the process of replacing gold

as the store of value for most investors?

Is that...

There's a war.

Yeah, there's a war for non-sovereign,

bearer, instrument store of value.

And it's Bitcoin versus silver and gold.

And gold's 10 trillion, and Bitcoin is 1 trillion.

And it's pretty clear that Bitcoin is winning.

Gold is losing.

Of all the commodities in the world,

the only one that isn't suffering

from inflation the last 12 months is gold.

You want to eliminate inflation,

build everything with 24-karat gold

that won't go up to price.

Bitcoin's definitely winning that struggle.

And it's going to continue

because you can move a billion dollar block

of digital gold at the speed of light.

You can program it 60 times a second,

and the maintenance cost is much lower.

The custodial rates are much higher.

So it's pretty clear that digital gold

is going to replace gold this decade.

There are probably some troubling things

in the infrastructure bill about, you know,

how the tax treatment of Bitcoin,

but it doesn't happen right away.

Do you think between now and when it's supposed to happen

that it won't happen?

I mean, that's an overhang on the future of Bitcoin

for being more than just a store value,

for being much more utilitarian, isn't it?

You know, I'm not at all trouble

with any of the regulation going on right now.

The safe haven for institutions is to use Bitcoin

as a store of value.

Bitcoin's the only ethical, technical,

and legal safe haven in the entire crypto ecosystem, right?

It's more technically secure

because of the ASICs and the proof of work mining.

It's more politically secure

because of the support for the miners

by the politicians and every jurisdiction.

It's more ethically secure

because it is universally acknowledged as common property.

So if your use case is to buy a billion dollars

of Bitcoin and hold it forever in lieu of gold

or in lieu of property,

or in lieu of a stock portfolio,

that without all the risks of stocks and equities

and bonds and all the headaches of precious metals,

then Bitcoin meets that use case.

All of the sound and fury in Washington

is going to have an impact on security tokens,

DeFi exchanges, crypto exchanges,

all the other use cases of crypto that are not Bitcoin,

and that's where we'll see all of this settle,

and that's why there's volatility right now.

So if you were to try to look at the eventual adoption

of Bitcoin and divide whatever that is

by 21 million, what number do you think is realistic

in the future, and I don't know whether I get...

People should never try to do a target

and a time for when you hit the target

because you can't get both right, but...

What do you think it's worth a million dollars

of coin someday, Michael?

The big idea is every currency in the world

collapses into the US dollar stable coin,

and the US dollar is the universal medium of exchange

for the world.

And people seeking a long dated store of value asset,

a synthetic asset, they start to demonetize

that second investment property,

and they demonetize gold,

and they demonetize an equity index.

So what do I expect?

I expect that Bitcoin, if it doubles every year

at the end of the decade, it will flip gold,

and then it'll flip monetary indexes,

a little bit of bonds, a little bit of real estate,

a little bit of equity,

and it emerges as a hundred trillion dollar asset class.

So a hundred X where it is right now,

and when we get there, it'll be five to seven percent

of the worldwide economy.

The US dollar will probably replace 150 currencies.

Maybe there'll only be two or three left.

There might be the euro, the CNY, the dollar,

everything else is probably going to disappear.

And then Bitcoin will be the world's monetary index.

If you simply want to keep your money,

and you don't want to express a credit sentiment

or an equity sentiment or some property

or real estate sentiment.

What if a country decides either China,

I don't know how China's going to react

to that scenario or even the United States?

Is it unstoppable or getting to that point

you just described as it depend on what happens

with very powerful semiconductor governments?

I think Bitcoin is unstoppable as digital property.

I think what you're going to see is three classes of countries.

The communist countries that don't give you property rights

won't like North Korea or Cuba won't let you own anything.

They'll probably ban it.

The countries that have weak currencies

will have capital controls.

They will let you own it, but they don't want you

to exchange it or trade it.

It's not illegal to own Bitcoin and China.

They just don't want you moving billions of dollars

out of their economy.

You see a collapse of currencies like Argentina,

the pesos 200 to 1.

In Turkey, you see the the leerer is 11.

It used to be 1.5, 15 years ago.

The weak currencies will have capital controls

that let you own it as property.

Of course, in the Western nations

where they have strong currencies in the US dollar,

of course, it's going to be deemed property.

You'll pay capital gains tax on it when you sell it.

And otherwise, it's pretty clear across the CAS

and it's universally acknowledged as common digital property.

And it's the only crypto asset that has that standing.

That's what makes it the institutional safe haven asset

in this space.

Michael Seller, you obviously, you've put your money

exactly where you believe things are headed with Microsoft.

I appreciate you coming on.

I listen, I don't know what to think of all that.

But that is amazing.

It's what you just described.

Completely amazing to me.

No wonder.

Thanks for having me, Joe.

You're welcome.

We'll see you later.

Thanks.