Michael Saylor At Bitcoin Atlantis 2024

Thank you everybody for showing up. So, do we want a little sailor, champ?

Sailor, sailor, sailor.

Well, thank you for coming. Happy to be in Madira.

So, I was delighted I got a chance to speak, but I was terrified because I knew that this crowd

would already know everything I'd already said, and I'd have to come up with something new to say.

So, I'm going to put your fears the rest. I'm not going to talk about all the things.

I'm not going to recite the Breedlove Sailor's series, verbatim, and we're not going to do the

four-hour Lex podcast. I actually put together a new presentation today, and this is my first time

that I'm presenting it. I was asked to talk about how Bitcoin's going to impact corporations and

individuals, and I get asked a lot about how do governments perceive Bitcoin? And I've spent,

you know, I spent a lot of my time dealing with corporations, talking to executives,

talking to institutional investors, talking to politicians, reading thousands and thousands of

pages of government filings. I'm the kind of guy that I will listen to every minute of congressional

testimony, just so I know what each of the 40 congressmen said or thought. Admittedly, I'll do it

on a speed lesson, but I will listen because I want to know what they thought. And so, what I prepared

today is kind of a malgum of my views on this, and I think this is the perfect audience presented to

after I finish. I'm sure I'll get a chance to meet some of you, and I look forward to getting

your feedback. So I'm going to start with a simple observation. I think we all understand

to survive everyone. Everyone must convert their work into assets that are scarce, desirable,

portable, durable, and maintainable. If you're a living creature, you're converting your work

into organic energy. We call it fat. Fats the most scarce, desirable, portable, durable,

maintainable asset in the organic world. It might have been demonized, but if you can't generate fat,

you're a type one diabetic. Life is going to be short and brutal and difficult. You really need

to be able to store energy. Now, if you're an individual, a company, a family, a government,

you have the same exact challenge. Now, we all know Bitcoin is the best asset. You agree?

There is no second best asset. That is why we are here. Because we need an asset. Bitcoin is the

best. There is no second best. But why is that the case? Let's just start with Bitcoin is digital.

And the entire world for the last 5,000 years has lived on analog assets. Real estate, gold,

silver, paper, money, bonds, buildings, collectables, sports teams,

livestock, cattle, and bales of tobacco, seashells, and glass beads.

Now, we have a digital asset. In fact, this is the digital asset. Maybe this is the only digital asset.

Now, what kind of asset is it? Well, you could think of it as digital capital.

We've talked about capitalism. There are hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital.

Bitcoin is digital capital. You could also call it property. We have hundreds of trillions of

dollars of property. Well, Bitcoin is digital property. Something you can own. We could also call

it wealth. Bitcoin is digital wealth. Analog wealth is when you own hundreds of acres of land

somewhere. We can also call it digital money. Money, a medium exchange, a store of value,

a unit of account. But as you see, sometimes when people get focused on money, they immediately

go to a medium exchange and they immediately think about a currency and they immediately get

themselves wrapped around the axle in opposition to the peso or the dollar or the niara. And it becomes

a very political discussion. When you come back to think of it as property or wealth, then it becomes

much less political. And of course, my favorite Bitcoin is digital energy. Now, fat is organic energy.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is static energy. Einstein showed us that.

When he gave us the E equals MC squared, he said matter is energy, energy is matter. Now,

Bitcoin is more than these things. I could go on for a while, but the point of this is not to talk

you about what Bitcoin is. You already know what Bitcoin means to you. The real point of this

discussion is to talk about what Bitcoin means to the rest of the world. Bitcoin is going to have

many types of participants in the future. You know, one set of participants, one set of people

that are going to be plugged into the Bitcoin network are currently individuals. There are 8 billion

individuals on the planet. What are individuals going to contribute to the Bitcoin network?

Right? The individuals bring creativity. They bring clarity. They bring conviction. They bring

capability. They bring the conscience to the world. Of course, they are going to hold Bitcoin for

life. Now, how many? Lots. Right? Right now, there are hundreds of millions of individuals that

have an interest in Bitcoin one way, shape, or the other. It's going to be billions. It's going to

continue to grow. A lot of times, a lot of our education is really focused on the individual.

But I think that we can't stop with the individual because these individuals form groups, families,

corporations, governments. They perform nonprofits. They form clubs, churches. There are a lot of ways

that individual creativity and aspiration manifest itself. Of course, one of my favorites is families.

There's a billion families, about a billion families, and why do families matter? They're the future

of humanity. That's why they matter. Right? Families bring the compassion. They bring the community.

They bring continuity. They bring joy. They bring hope. And a family is just a much more powerful unit

than just an individual. Families will hold. And we started to think about families now and how

they join the network. But there's a third organization, third type of group, an investment company.

This is a set of organizations have not been involved in Bitcoin much for the first 15 years of

its existence. But investment companies can be, they can be mutual funds. They can be trust funds.

They can be exchange traded funds. These ETFs. They can be hedge funds. And they have not trillions,

but probably 100 trillion dollars worth of assets floating out there. And they get to decide how

those assets will be disposed of and how they'll be situated. And they are actually acting on

behalf of families and on behalf of individuals. So on one hand, you can't write them off when they

can decide to reallocate 10 billion dollars from gold to Bitcoin on behalf of 18 million retirees

that used to work for the postal service. Right? And when they make that decision, they're making

that decision and impacts families and impacts individuals. But they're also making the decision

as a fiduciary. And the last 36 days have been an illustration of how important these kind of

companies are because every day in the market, they're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of

Bitcoin. They're trading it and they're building up billion dollar positions. This has just started.

We're 36 days into a massive adoption of just these exchange traded funds. But it's going to just

keep going. And they're going to ripple all through the world, through all sorts of economies.

And they will have a profound impact. And in my opinion, a profound impact for good used to be,

if you go back to 2018 and the Bitcoin community, if you said the word, you said Larry Fink,

people go, they would say, oh, Larry Fink doesn't like us. And in the year 2024, Larry Fink goes on

television and speaks to leaders in the world and says, Bitcoin is a store of value. It protects

the sovereignty of the individual. It allows you to achieve your hopes. It is hope. Larry Fink has said

Bitcoin is hope. Now, what does that say to me? It says, we don't have enemies. What we have are people

that need Bitcoin that don't yet know why they should be our friend.

When someone goes on television and they're asked, what do you think about Bitcoin and they get

poked and they're a little bit irritated? They got to ask the question.

They're not an enemy of Bitcoin. They're just not prepared for the question. And in fact,

over time, the journalists will do the poking because they know the most important thing in the

world today is Bitcoin. And you're going to have a group of people that understand it. They will say

it's the future. And you'll have a group of people that don't understand it and they will not

have embraced it. But at the end of the day, with time, with education, we're going to see more

and more people join the network and they're going to participate. Now, those investment companies

aren't the only type of companies. They're operating companies. By the way, how many?

Have you do a quick Google search? 333 million is the count on Google of companies in the world.

Think about that for a second. 333 million. There's a lot of companies and all of these individuals

and all of these families, they all act through corporate entities. Oftentimes, you'll say a

group of five or six or 10 or 50 or 500 or 5,000 or 50,000. Now, how important are companies?

Well, they provide all the products, all the services, they develop technology. Not many people in

the room can create their own iPhone. You know, not many people in the room want to manufacture

and ship all their food or grow their own fruit in the winter. These companies are critical

to our quality of life. We know that from Austrian economics. But if you're wondering, like, how long

have we had specialization of labor? You know, one million years ago, they dug up stone axe factories

and it indicates that a million years ago, before we had writing, before there was recorded history,

there was a company manufacturing stone axes, which meant that there was a specialized economy

with corporations. But there are people growing food, there were people hunting, there were people

fighting, there were probably people collecting the taxes to pay for the stone axes, for the people

fighting. It's all happened before. And today, companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft

perform pretty systemically important roles as does the airline that flew you here, as does the

contractor that built the stadium or built the bridges or the tunnels or the airports you landed

on. These are important. What are they going to bring to Bitcoin? Well, they're going to bring

new services, like cash app as a service. They're going to bring new products. They're going to

bring your signing devices. They're going to bring you full nodes or integrated nodes or the like.

They're going to bring new technology. One day, I believe Apple, Microsoft, Google, they will

all integrate Bitcoin and layer two protocols like lightning into their phones, into their computers,

into their web services, into their cloud services. They're going to bring cool applications.

Every single Bitcoin wallet and lightning wallet is a cool application. They were all made by

a corporation. They're going to provide support and maybe importantly, they provide credibility.

Companies have credibility with the people. When a large corporation offers something to a

billion people over the weekend, you get 437 million downloads. And individuals can't get 437

million people to do anything over the weekend. When a company has a problem, they pick up the

phone, they call the White House, so they call a senator or they call a congressman or they go

to court and they sue. Companies actually can avail themselves of the legal system, the

political system, the executive branch. Sometimes they're in controversies, but companies of

credibility and that credibility will defend the network. It will spread the network. It will

enhance the network. It will actually embrace or enhance and support the lives of every individual

and every family. We need them. Companies are not the evil empire creature that's against you.

Companies are just made up of people. The person running the company either understands Bitcoin

or they don't. If they don't, then they're just a supporter waiting to be recruited. Or there'll

be someone that understands it. And they own it personally and they're waiting for the political

environment and their company to change so that they can buy it corporately. Tim Cook has admitted

to owning Bitcoin. Lots of senior level CEOs own it. Sometimes they're reacting to their shareholders,

their boarded directors, their employees, their regulators, and privately individually they would

pursue one agenda but publicly because they have to report or they have to represent the

corporate interests and they have to respect the constituencies they serve. Like the customers

that don't understand it, they have to wait until their customers understand it or demand it

before they can move. But ultimately these operating companies are going to be great supporters

of the network. They already are and they will hold all. They're going to build Bitcoin on their

balance sheets in the same way. Now we get to everybody's favorite banks. Right? And

you can be your own bank. That's the promise of Bitcoin. But you know,

there are thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of banks in the world and they're serving,

they're serving, you know, who knows how many people, you know, billions and billions of people

and they're custody hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets and they are intertwined

essentially in the fabric of the economy. And Bitcoin offers them something too. It offers them

the same benefits and many of the benefits it offers a family and individual corporation.

But what do they do? Well, they they custody, they extend credit, they'll give you a loan,

they make sure they deal with compliance rules. How many different sets of rules are there in the

world? There's 10,000 jurisdictions, 10,000 different sets of rules. And the banks have armies of

lawyers and accountants and compliance people to figure out how to give you a mortgage or to

figure out how to give you a car loan. Right? It's a lot of work. You know, you don't really want

to borrow money from the dude down the street, right? They call that a loan shark. And yes, you can do

it, but the interest rate, you know, is going to run to 70% a year, not 7% a year. So however bad you

think it is with a bank, it gets infinitely worse when it's an individual, right? And they don't

sue you. They break your legs when you don't pay the bill. So banks are really important for these

things. They also have an important role in transfer settlement, moving, moving assets around

millions of times a day or billions of times a day. And ultimately, you know, they used to joke,

banks where all the money are, where all the money is, banks will hold, banks will also hold

Bitcoin on their balance sheet in time. As well, nonprofits, right? How important are nonprofits?

Your church, your school, right? Your soccer team or your clubs, right? The Garden Club,

the Pet Club, the Horse Association, the Olympics, every possible nonprofit, every activist group.

You know that almost 6% of the U.S. economy is nonprofits? I mean, it's an incredible amount,

right? And so what can they contribute? Well, they educate, they empower, they will expand the

Bitcoin network throughout the world. They'll go places that, you know, maybe you don't want to go

and they will go, right? They will drive engagement, right? They have missions to engage with the

weak, the young, the old, the poor. I mean, everybody, everywhere, over the border where you are not,

they go into dangerous war zones. They're the Red Cross, right? They provide medical services,

right? And they provide advocacy. They're pretty effective at providing advocacy. When they're

on your side, they spread ideas all through the world. And when they're against you, they can also

be not so good. And they're endowed, right? The greatest endowments of the world, the Harvard,

the Yale Endowments, right? These institutions like Cambridge or Oxford, they've been around for

hundreds and hundreds of years. That's because they have endowments. Bitcoin is the best, the best asset

in the endowment, right? This is a solution to them. And this is a need they have. And we will see

more and more of them embrace this. And then finally, I could subdivide the world in the 37

categories, but I'm going to end with governments because oftentimes people think, well, the government

is against Bitcoin and what I'm here to say is the government is made up of people and the

governments here to provide essential services everywhere on earth to deal with with defense, water,

sewer, education, medicine, insurance, social security for the young, for the old, for the orphan.

There's a lot of things governments do, including keeping traffic working and keeping the ports working.

And so how do they integrate? What can they bring to the Bitcoin network? Education?

We're actually here in Madera at the only reason I'm here is I was invited here by the president of Madera.

And so they have this role. They will integrate. They will provide security. I think

governments will eventually engage in Bitcoin mining. They will support Bitcoin miners. They will

defend Bitcoin miners. When you see a world of 100 different countries, all of them mining Bitcoin,

then an attack on one of the Bitcoin miners may result in a response by another country. So

I think the governments will also be advocates and the governments have balance sheets and the

governments will hold them. So everybody here, they all need Bitcoin. They can all contribute to Bitcoin.

And they will all support it. So keep point. Everybody. And when I say everyone, I don't mean every person.

I mean every entity. The ones you love, the ones you hate, your enemies, your friends, the company you

dislike, the company that you adore, the other family, whatever, your favorite sports team, and the

awful soccer team, the beat your soccer team. You saw your awful football team, the beat your football

it's not just Bedford that needs Bitcoin. Everybody benefits for Bitcoin. They might not know it,

but they do benefit. Why do they benefit? Because the story of civilization is about purging

toxicity from our systems. Human started living longer when we realized we shouldn't drink water

with germs in it. And then we realized why do we cook our food to get the toxic germs out of the

food? And then at some point we realized that if we could get the toxic pathogens out of our blood,

we might live longer. And I, biotics are about getting the toxins out of your blood, right? Sterilization,

boiling waters by getting the toxins out of the water, cooking food is about getting the toxins out

of the food. We've lived with toxic money for 5,000 years. The money is simply the economic energy

coursing through every government, every corporation, every group, every family, every individual.

When it's moving through your P&L, right? And it's toxic, it's undermining your performance,

but when you store it in your treasury, right? Then it's actually just undermining your life

expectancy. So toxicity is holding us back. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 50. By 1950

or was 70, that was the conquest of infectious disease. Another way to say it was overcoming toxic

pathogens. And we did it with a combination of sterilization, modern medicine, antibiotics.

Everybody wants to live longer. Even the people you disagree with, even the people with

missions you don't agree with, they all want to achieve more of it. And they all want to achieve

more of it by not being held back by toxicity. So everyone needs it, everyone benefits from it,

but the most important point is everyone benefits Bitcoin, right? When the bank that you hate

starts to custody Bitcoin, well, that just means that the Bitcoin that you self-custody became

worth 10 times as much, right? These ETFs that have bought up 1% of the supply of Bitcoin,

well, they have conveyed 100X as much benefit to the people that don't believe in ETFs, right?

It's $400 billion dividend to people that don't like ETFs. They're not hurting you. What happens

is when your enemy joins, you get, you're improved, the network is improved, and the likelihood

of war decreases. If we want to eliminate war and conflict and violence, we really want

all of our enemies to settle their differences in a fair, equitable fashion. And the fair,

equitable, peaceful way to sell your differences is Bitcoin. So you shouldn't fear those who don't

understand who are your enemy who join Bitcoin. You should fear those who are your enemies that

don't join Bitcoin. They're the ones that will use bullets to solve the problem.

So let's get to the happy part. How are individuals going to benefit from Bitcoin?

Well, what does Bitcoin bring you, right? I mean, it empowers everyone to live their best possible

life, right? It's bringing you freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, you go where you want,

you have control of your destiny. It's not that different that, you know, for people that fast,

we've discovered that you don't have to eat for three or four days. And when you realize you

don't have to eat for five days at a time, that's pretty empowering. Like, I can go through an

airport without stopping to eat. It's pretty amazing. Well, imagine being able to go where you want

to go. It opens up opportunity for you. It provides you with emotional security, mental security,

physical security, economic security, and provides camaraderie. I mean, look at us all here today.

I have something in common with every one of you. And it's just awesome.

I invite you all to think about your relationships and the nature of your relationships before

you discovered Bitcoin. And then think about how they changed after you discovered Bitcoin.

Right? I just see it as like, it's like coming out, out of the darkness into the light.

And that's why I see Bitcoin is empowerment and hope for the individual. But for the family,

what does it mean to the family? It is a foundation to support your family for generations.

Right? What is the tragedy of the family? The tragedy of the family is when you run your

family on toxic money and you build your family on defective assets and defective property.

I'll give you a classic cliché tragedy. Our family came to this country. My great-grandfather bought

this farm. My grandfather formed this land. My father formed this land. Now I can't pay the taxes

on it. We got to sell it and all move into like apartments. Why? Because property is a defective

land. It was the best idea 200 years ago. I get it. But if you actually own a thousand acres and

then someone comes in and creates a state and a mayor gets elected and the mayor decides to spend lots

of money on whatever and they raise your taxes and raise them again and raise them at third time.

Pretty soon the people with the farm can't pay the taxes and then the government decides that

you're the bad guy. They take all your land and eject you or evict you. You know, and maybe they

don't do it directly. Maybe first you mortgage the farm and then you can't pay the mortgage and

then the bank sees it your property. And that's a tragedy. And what is the tragedy? The tragedy is

you built your family on a defective asset. You need an defective money. Now you're fault. I mean,

look, you go back a million years. People are dying at age 28. They have no antibiotics. We didn't

know that sugar was toxic or teeth fell out. We didn't know how to deal with an pneumonia infection.

You get cut. You die. You know, someone drinks water. It kills them. Eat the wrong food. You get

dysentery. You get cholera. No, you know, whatever. The history of humanity is people dying and

suffering because of toxicity. And the promise of technology is first we come up with the science

to figure out it's toxic, right? The microscope let us look into the blood and realize that there

were bacteria that were killing us. You need the instrument. Then you need the understanding. Then

you solve the problem. That is the story of civilization. That is how humans progress. Well,

with families, a lot of families struggle and the economic struggle is a defective economic

strategy. Bitcoin gives you that foundation. And you can use it to protect your family, relocate

anywhere, change your career, create a legacy, accumulate more assets, accumulate wealth,

plan for the future. You know, if you asked me, before Bitcoin, if you asked me, how are you going

to create or fund your foundation for the next 100 years? I would have said something like,

I guess I give all my money to Wall Street and hire some good money managers. And 70 years from

now, the grandson of someone that I hired today might go to college, figure out what to do and

day trade or shuffle my money around so I don't lose it. That is the best idea. It is not a good idea.

Right? That is how the Rockefellers do it. But what you will see is that 100 years after someone

actually accumulates some wealth, the money is generally gone 99% of the time. And what Bitcoin offers

to family is they will actually plan for your great granddaughter and think that maybe there will be

some support for them. And no one is going to take it from them.

What do those, what do those investments companies need, Bitcoin? Right? They need Bitcoin to attract capital.

You see it happening, $600 million flowing into BlackRock yesterday,

$10 billion in a month. Right? If you look at the ETFs, what you will see is that the Bitcoin ETFs are

crawling up past all the commodities, they are about to eat the gold ETFs. And then they are going to eat

the S&P 500 index ETFs. When that happens, everybody is going to take note. Vanguard is going to take note.

Right? The world is going to change. You can't attract capital without Bitcoin and you can't

outperform. Bitcoin is going to outperform the S&P, end gold, end bonds. And as it outperforms,

everyone who is indifferent and objective, who doesn't know what it is and doesn't care.

Right? They are going to just say, move more of my money over here because the world is full of

people that would just like to not lose their money. Right? And so what we are going to see is

investment companies need this to outperform. And that is going to result in them generating income.

And that results in them staying relevant. Right? How many people are bragging about their new

gold ETFs? Right? It's not relevant. It's not relevant. You want to be a leader, right? The people

that we look to are the people that were discovered or created Google and Apple and Microsoft. And

they create the next airplane. And they put Starlink in the sky and they give us internet and they

give us the next phone. Right? Be relevant. Be a leader. These companies want to be leaders.

Right? You won't find a CEO that says my aspiration is to be viewed as a follower and late to the next

great thing. And they don't want to create shareholder value. Right? You can't create shareholder value

by shrinking. And so that takes us to operating companies. It's the same thing. But operating companies

for the most part in the world are like type one diabetics. I had 100 competitors over 20 years.

They all failed. There's a 99% mortality rate with these companies. Right? You look at the number

and you're like, well, I don't know 300 million companies. That's because they're failing. Millions

every single month. They're all failing all the time. Why are they failing? They can't store energy.

They can't harness capital. Right? What does Facebook do? They give all their capital back to

their shoulders and a dividend and a buyback. What does Apple do? They give their capital back and

a dividend and a buyback. They take on debt. How do companies fail? They leverage up. They take on

debt. What happens when you take on debt? Well, instead, I used to say to people, well, we have 500

million in capital. We could go for 40 quarters. We go for 10 years and not make any money and we'll

still be in business. It's like you could go for 10 years and not eat and still be alive. That's

indestructible. On the other hand, when you give all the money back and you borrow a billion dollars,

well, in that case, you end up with a debt covenant and you have to generate 27 million dollars

this quarter. And if you generate 26 million dollars this quarter, if you miss by one,

one one thousandth of your capital structure. If you miss by 0.1%, you actually trip all the

debt covenants in the bank owns you. You're technically, you're technically in violation of your

of your debt. They can call the loan you're insolvent. So think about the difference between you starving

to death if you miss one meal versus you starving to death when you have an eaten for the year.

Okay, that's the difference between having capital and having no capital.

The status quo in the world today is we tell people you can't keep capital in operating

company because all of the uses, all the liquid capital is dilutive and it doesn't beat

the cost of capital.

Bitcoin solves the problem.

You can harness capital, you can improve your products, you can grow your revenues, you

can beat inflation for the first time.

You know the magnificent seven are good investments, the other 493 companies are not because the

other 493 companies cannot beat inflation because beating inflation means raising, increasing

your cash flow 8% every year forever or more like raising your prices 10% a year forever.

Who can do that?

A digital monopoly, a company with no cost, with monopoly pricing power.

How many of them are there in the world?

There's like one in 10,000 companies that you would know of and one in a thousand public

companies.

These companies, the ones that you might be afraid of, they're not winning, right?

They're struggling in the same way and Bitcoin is a lifeline for them that you could think

of them as wage slaves in the same way that you are a wage slave.

Everybody is working having to get 10% more every year just to keep ahead of inflation.

It's just theirs is in revenue and cash flow.

And so what is Bitcoin offer them?

Extended lifespan.

You see a CEO and you say, well, you're going to adopt Bitcoin, he says, why should I say,

well, it might keep your company from going bankrupt in 10 years.

It might allow you to continue to do business and serve your customers for the next 100 years.

How many companies are 100 years old?

Not many, I'll ask you another question.

How many famous education institutions with endowments are 100 years old?

Most of them, right?

Why is it that universities last 100 years and companies don't?

No capital.

That's why.

Do you think anybody goes in business wanting to die?

That you think they want to have their company fail in 12 years or six years or 25 years?

No, they're stuck in a system, right?

They're stuck in a traditional system that banks them do this.

Banks have the same issue.

They want to attract and retain capital.

They want to decrease risk.

You know, you could say, well, you know, the bank is beholden the central bank.

Well, here's another vision.

What about 100,000 banks that are all tapped into the Bitcoin network and they don't have to worry about the Bitcoin network shutting them down?

Right? When a bank joins Bitcoin, it becomes systemically robust, much more anti-fragile.

This is a benefit to banks.

They'd like to find a way to do this.

This will decrease their risk, increase their earnings, let them create shareholder value, let them delight their clients.

They have a billion customers.

They have corporations.

They need to serve them.

All of these companies, all of these nonprofits, they all need the bank to support what they do, right?

And time they will.

The nonprofits are also going to benefit.

They want to raise capital, but also they have endowments.

They want their endowments to go up 40% a year, not go up 4% a year.

There's nobody running a church, a charity, a benefit, a school that will say,

we don't want our endowment to appreciate and we don't want an endowment.

This allows them to harness technology.

This allows them to extend their reach globally.

You know, Bitcoin is money that's global and it's got a half-life of forever.

All of these endowments, they're using money that has a half-life of 10 years or 5 years.

Your property might have a half-life of 20 years.

Their investments are short duration and their investments are local, right?

Their property is local.

So Bitcoin stretches your scope across time and space.

Now tell me what charitable pursuit doesn't want to do more?

And last forever, they all do.

You won't find anyone that says, well, we just want to be out of business in three years.

So, Bitcoin is a solution to nonprofits.

And for governments, traditionally people have thought, you know,

well, the government doesn't like or won't embrace Bitcoin,

but you know they will embrace Bitcoin because Bitcoin provides them

with the financial power to thrive in the 21st century.

And there's no government art that doesn't appreciate the power of money, right?

This will allow them to lower taxes.

It will allow them to strengthen their currencies, defend their sovereignty,

improve their economies, join the global community and delight their citizens.

And if you talk to any politician, there's none of them that will say these aren't agenda items for them.

And if you say, well, could you achieve that with infinite money?

And say, well, I don't know if I could achieve it, but it would make it a lot easier, right?

And if you said, well, how about if I just took all your money away from you in five years,

would that make it easier or harder?

And the answer is, it would make it somewhere between hard and impossible.

So now I get to the important part of my talk.

This is where you come in.

Ask not what Bitcoin can do for you.

Ask what you can do for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin needs you.

If you're wondering why you're here, you're here because Bitcoin needs you.

And my deepest hope is when you leave, you'll leave empowered, inspired, and enabled to go do good for Bitcoin,

wherever you go back to after you leave Madira.

I can't stress this enough.

Everyone you encounter is an opportunity to improve the world by gaining their support for Bitcoin.

Your customers, your employees, your boss, your investors, your clients, the mayor, the coach on the team,

the parents at the PTA meeting, the teachers of your kids, the doctor at the hospital, your dentist,

everybody you run into is an opportunity.

And what we can do collectively that will make the biggest difference is spread to people, right?

The knowledge of Bitcoin is like, if you knew that drinking dirty water would kill you,

you would tell people you love to stop drinking it.

If you knew, and other artists could save their life, you would tell them about your experience.

When it comes to this, and we, I've got the orange pill here, and we talk about orange pilling,

but I break it down in two different cycles, right?

First of all, everybody you meet has an intellectual perspective on Bitcoin.

Okay, and they're going to click through these five years.

The first perspective is denier.

Bitcoin is a scam, it's tulip bulbs, it doesn't exist, it's a ghost, a mirage, a pyramid scheme.

And if we convince them that, you know, I would show them a picture of all the Bitcoin miners in the world and say,

oh, look, there's like hundreds and hundreds of data centers burning more gigawatts of electricity than the US Navy.

This is not a scam, this is the most powerful computer network in the world.

And we want to get them from denier to skeptic.

The skeptic is, okay, I get it, Bitcoin may be a good thing, but it's too good to be true, the government's going to ban it.

You hear that a lot, okay, it's good, I get it, but someone's going to take it away from you, the skeptic.

And what you have to then show is, well, if the government was going to ban it,

they wouldn't be bragging about having captured three billion of it and selling it in the open market, right?

Nor would they have approved the ETFs, nor would they be fighting over who gets jurisdiction over it, right?

And we need to move people from denier to skeptic.

And then the next step, we take the trader, okay, well, maybe I guess I might buy some, but I'll probably sell it.

I don't, you know, I'll buy it if it's going up, I'll sell it if I think it's going down.

I don't have an opinion, but look, that's a step up.

And then hopefully they get to that next level investor.

Bitcoin is great technology, just like Google, just like Apple, just like Microsoft,

just like water, electricity, cars, and planes are great technology.

It's technology, it's the future.

I should invest in it.

You made a lot of money on the magnificent seven.

How do you not own Bitcoin?

Do you not believe in the magnificent seven?

You think semiconductors won't make a difference.

You don't believe in artificial intelligence.

They have the same cycles by the way.

Once we get them to invest or the last step intellectually is Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment.

And if Jack Dorsey's here, I give him a shout out, Jack Dorsey put that in my head.

By the way, don't get dejected that someone may actually be a denier.

You know who was a denier?

Me.

And you know what I became next?

Askeptic.

And then at some point I looked and I said, you know, the world's kind of messed up and

interest rates are zero and my dollars are generating zero.

I'm going to buy Bitcoin and I became a trader.

And then after I bought the Bitcoin I started reading a lot more and listening to a lot more

of podcasts and thought about it and I realized, no, I should be an investor.

You know, and I would say when I got in, when you started hearing about me I was kind

of at the investor stage but it was everybody in this community and every Bitcoin podcast

or an every writer and every educator that collectively got me over the line to becoming

a maximalist where I said.

So, yeah, if you don't think you make a difference, you do make a difference, right?

You're never going to see a collection of people like this at an Apple investor conference

or at a Google investor, a Microsoft investor or Nvidia investor conference or a gold investor

conference.

This is very special.

I like the orange.

I'll marry the orange.

When you're orange-pelling, right, you're working people intellectually but there's also

spiritual and they all start as observers.

It's all the people writing about Bitcoin on Twitter and they observe it but they don't

own any and then they become participants and then they start to actually buy and build

on it and maybe they own like 1% and then the believers say, wait a minute, this really

is the best asset and maybe 40% of my portfolio is liquid and my rest of my wealth is in my

house and so they go and they start to put a bunch of their liquid wealth into Bitcoin

because they're believers.

And then at some point you get to be hardcore and I'll call you an adherent and then you're

like all in.

The only thing I want to invest in is Bitcoin.

You know I'm not saying you got to sell all your chairs just the ones you don't need.

But this is a spiritual journey and then at the final point you become an advocate and

when you're an advocate it's not just you're all in, you want to go tell other people.

You want to convince your company, your charity, your church, your government, your friends,

your family, you're an advocate.

So think of this as a continuum and we're working together to move people from the lower

left quadrant, you know, deny or observer and they're going to say, well don't talk to

me about Bitcoin.

They know about it but they don't want to talk about it.

And you move to the upper right quadrant, you know, you're a maximalist and you're an

advocate and you know and you don't necessarily just stay there.

We all got to work together to keep ourselves motivated to be in that quadrant because it

can be quite a drain.

But I just leave you with this thought, right, which is Bitcoin grows stronger with every

new participant at any level, right?

You know you can say whatever you want about me to spell the name right, right, say the

name right, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, right.

When people are talking crap about Bitcoin we're winning.

When they're not sure about Bitcoin we're winning.

When they're liking it, we're winning.

When they're debating something, we're winning, right?

Bitcoin grows stronger and I posted this yesterday, it's like Bitcoin represents the digital

transformation of capital.

What is that worth?

That is worth half of everything in the human race.

It's half of everything.

There's other stuff, medicine, politics, education, I don't dismiss it.

But the digital transformation of capital and energy and property means that every person,

every family, every corporation, every government, every movement can live their best life, achieve

their greatest aspirations, right?

And when you think about that Olympic athlete and you walk in the room and say, hey, guess

what? The new science came in.

We don't have to bleed you this week.

You know, you get to keep your blood while you're working out.

You know, and we're not going to cut off your oxygen, right?

At that point you think maybe you're going to chance to win this thing.

And so I want to thank everybody in this thing with the observation.