Out for our main story of the day, I recently spoke to Michael Sailor, co-founder and CEO of
MicroStrategy. It is one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin with $4.8 billion worth of
the cryptocurrency on its books. We covered the company's Bitcoin adoption, US regulation, and more.
Here's what he told me about the recent price volatility and how crypto could put an end to cyber
attacks like the one Russia is carrying out on Ukraine. Joining me now on crypto world is
Michael Sailor, the co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy. Michael, thank you for joining us.
In the past, you've attributed crypto market volatility to high-speed trading.
Is that what you think? Is it play these last few weeks?
I think that the volatility is driven by the immature of the asset class. That means the lack of
wash trading rules. You can buy it and sell it in the same hour and harvest attacks loss. I think
that's fairly immature. I think 20 acts of leverage on the offshore exchanges. I think the
wild west of crypto derivatives, I think cross collateralization of altcoins into
eth into Bitcoin through DeFi exchanges on a Saturday night through a very thin piece of liquidity
on the 177th biggest coin. All of those things are a recipe for volatility. And then the uncertainty
about the regulatory environment because as regulation comes, it has impact on all these different
crypto systems and they're all cross collateralized to each other. So I'd be surprised if there
was volatility. It comes with the territory, there are pros and cons. I think that the volatility
will be damped as the regulation progresses and that will encourage institutional adoption.
With respect to the use cases, it most excite you for Bitcoin. Beyond it being a speculative tool
to put on a company's balance sheet, I mean, you're seeing El Salvador experiment with it as legal
tender. You're seeing Ukrainian militant groups fundraising in crypto because banks are blocking
payments into the country. You are seeing it used in Canada because of trucker protests.
There are all these different ways in which, you know, currency becomes this
way to to liberate actions. I mean, there's also been talk that, you know, Russia might get around
the sanctions regime via crypto rails. I just wonder what most excite you about Bitcoin and the
use cases today and perhaps how it might be used in the future. I think if you look at it as digital
property, it's pretty clear there are billions and billions of people that would rather
own digital property than physical property. And I think that the most forward thinking use case
is Bitcoin is digital energy. If you go on Twitter, you find like in one hour, 500 Michael
Sailor bots, they'll look at spun up. If you go on YouTube, there are about 500 to 1000 Michael
Sailor Bitcoin giveaway scams every week. We take them down every 15 minutes. The world, the
cyberspace is is beset by scammers, fishers, denial of service attacks, spammers, and it's never
been worse. It's literally awful. And the reason it's awful is because no one's going to skin in the
game or another way to say it is there's no conservation of energy in cyberspace. I can go into a
hotel in the real world post the credit card, smash up the hotel and they charge me money.
But what if I could go into every single hotel on earth in every hotel room in every hotel on
earth using a Python script and smash them all up and not charge, not get charged any money.
Right. The entire world would come to a grinding halt. And so that's the that's the status quo on
Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and office 365 right now. And you're watching the front page
of the paper. If you look at the Wall Street Journal today, massive amount of cyber attacks being
launched on Ukraine right now, they're all denial service attacks. Denial of service attacks is
like when someone hits your website with 15 million requests in an hour, they can do that because
it doesn't cost them a dollar or a request or $10. So if you want to solve the problem of of
cybersecurity and make cyberspace safe for children and if you want to eliminate hostile cyber
attacks and if you want to clean up Twitter and YouTube and stop con men and fishing and scamming,
the simple solution is let let someone get an orange check mark next to their name if they post
$10 worth of Satoshi's and you would have a billion orange checks. And now you lock down all websites
and all inboxes and all comments to people with the orange check. And of course, you would only have
to post $10 once in your life, which is fine because you're not going to denial of service
attacks someone. But if if I'm a hostile bot like these people that actually impersonate me on YouTube,
they have 40,000 live bot listeners. They would have to post $400,000 in Bitcoin every 10 minutes or
every 15 minutes because they refresh every 10 minutes McKenzie. If you did that, it would cost you
$40 million a day to launch that attack instead of nothing. And so the real, the compelling
application of Bitcoin is it's a layer of monetary energy that you can overlay over the digital
information of the first generation internet. That's fascinating.