Bitcoin Park Fireside: Michael Saylor & Matt Odell

What a week. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Happy beer. This is Bitcoin Park. Welcome.

Kind of crazy, huh? So a lot of birds and bees buzzing around your park.

All right. I apologize to Michael before we got on stage. The backstage was actually a little bit

hotter than it is in here, but it's it's quite hot with all the well, all the heads in the room. So

our air conditioning is a work in progress. We're we're trying our best here. It's a small grassroots

iterating project. To those of that not aware, Bitcoin Park is supported by our members.

So we have members that support us on an annual basis and that's who makes this possible. By a

show of hands, who here is a member of Bitcoin Park? Thank you guys. It would not be possible without you.

Okay, well, Michael's time is short, so let's just get into it.

First of all, Michael, it's been absolutely crazy watching your Bitcoin journey. You just go zero to

60 and just ape right into the space in a big way. When you think about this week, I mean,

what are you looking at right now? How are you thinking about the space? How have we gotten so far,

so fast? And how do you think about that, basically, I guess?

Well, I mean, I think we just see great signs of Bitcoin adoption throughout the world.

Bitcoin's an issue. So the fact you have governors that have interests, the fact you have a lot of

senators that have interests, the fact that you have a lot of congress people that have interests,

the fact that you have two of the three major presidential candidates that have interests,

the fact that you've got tons and tons of wall streeters, you know, you've got representatives

and fidelity and black rock and the like. That's interesting. The fact you've got a bunch of operating

companies, you know, publicly traded operating companies like Marathon that are here in size. I mean,

this big sponsor and all the other public and private Bitcoin miners, I think you would have seen

the Bitcoin miners private, but you roll the clock back four years. You didn't see any public

operating companies. You didn't see any public investment trust. You didn't really see any

politicians. I don't think they would have. Well, first of all, they just wouldn't have any interest.

It just would other than squash it out like a bug. Maybe negative interest, but no positive interest.

You know, and not a lot of enthusiasm. And now I think they can't help but be interested. So I think,

sometimes the message is the message. And sometimes half a success in life is just showing up,

right? The fact that you're there is sending the message regardless of what comes out of your

mouth. And I know in the world of, say, public companies or Wall Street, the worst thing is not

for someone to hate you. The worst thing is for them to be indifferent to you and view you as

irrelevant. And so, you know, that's a kiss of death is you're irrelevant. I don't even think about

you. A lot of people don't like Tesla stock and a lot of people short it, but it's not a problem.

Well, you know, there's probably $20 billion of short interest in micro strategy, but then they go

long Bitcoin. And I think it's good. If they just get up every day and they like hate on us or

like on us, it doesn't matter what matters is they're engaged. And so I think this week is all about

engagement. You just see engagement across their celebrities, their politicians, their investors,

and then there are Bitcoiners, and then there are the engineers, the technologies. They'll come

together. And this is presumably it feels like this is the richest, like most, most energetic gathering

of Bitcoin in a long time. Maybe the one that I remember is most energetic. Yeah, I mean, it seems

absolutely unreal to me. I remember my first Bitcoin conference was in 2013 in New York. And it was

just like an empty exhibitor hole. You know, there was a bunch of companies that had booths that

they paid for that known was standing at some of them had booth babes that they overpaid for.

And most of those businesses have gone out of business. And it's just the last, if you look at

the last 10 years, last 11 years, it's been absolutely astounding the pace of growth of this space.

And it definitely feels like it's accelerated. Even just this week feels like a decade almost.

And in terms of progress, in terms of Bitcoin's recognition, I mean, I agree with you,

you definitely cannot argue that that Bitcoin is irrelevant. It's definitely more relevant than

it's ever been. We have more haters than we've ever had. We've had more lovers than we've ever had.

And it's just been crazy to watch. So Michael, you have basically made a name for yourself with

turning micro strategy, turning your baby into this Bitcoin accumulation machine. And I've had

this thesis for a long time that every single individual, every single government, every single company

is going to try and accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. That is the ultimate goal. And

most just don't realize it yet. And the people that realize it first have the most again.

Since you've embarked on that strategy, we've seen over the last, it actually kind of took a

little bit longer than maybe even you expected. I definitely took longer than I expected. But we're

starting to see smaller public companies around the world trying to adopt a similar strategy.

I'm kind of curious how you think about that. Because to me, yeah, I'm not going to answer the

question for you. How do you think about that? These smaller public companies, I mean, one example

would be like the meta planet that's happening in Japan where they just said we're going to do the

micro strategy thing in a press release and the stock kind of just goes wild. You know, I've got a

chart that I tweet and the chart shows that bonds are minus 5% ARR for the past four years.

And Bitcoin is plus 55%. So if you're an operating company by law, you're only up until

January of this year. By law, you had to invest your access capital in treasuries.

And you couldn't invest it in the S&P index. And you couldn't, yeah, an operating company can't

reasonably hold their access assets in real estate, timber, rights, sports teams, and Apple stock.

The reason not well talked about, but the reason Berkshire Hathaway, for example, has so much cash

is because they can't buy the S&P index and they can't buy more Apple stock because they would trip

a 40% covenant or a limit that's put in place by the SEC 40 act. And if the company gets more than

40% of its liquid assets in a security, it's no longer an operating company. And that means it can't

take on debt, it can't issue option. It basically blows up the company. You become an investment trust.

So for 100 years, 80 years, the law forces operating companies to hold their access capital

in an asset which is losing 5% of its economic energy, 5% of its price power per year.

And when 2020 came along, we were pushed into Bitcoin space, but

there are really three crippling things that keep a company from swapping out bonds for Bitcoin,

or basically putting Bitcoin in and bonds out. The first thing is you need the SEC to endorse

it as an institutional or a legitimate asset class, a digital commodity. And not a security,

it's either illegal because it's illegal to an Apple stock.

And it's definitely you don't want to have it on registered security. So we had to have digital

commodity first step. And we kind of got 75% of the way there in January. It's not a perfected

endorsement. It's a grudging endorsement with reservation. But we crossed the event horizon.

You can't turn that back. The second thing that's required is fair accounting. You can't invest in

something that you only lose money in and you never make money in. Just simple, right? No one wants

to invest and always lose money and never make money. But the accounting rules before January

were you can only lose money in Bitcoin. And so nobody is going to buy an asset that always gets

written down and never get written up. And so that got that's optionally fixed in January. That's

mandatory fair accounting in next January. That's the second leg of the stool. And the third leg of

the stool is Google can wire a billion dollars to JP Morgan every month and say put it in T-bills.

And it's like 15 seconds. And if JP Morgan loses it, it's JP Morgan's problem. The status quo right

now is Google would have to wire a billion dollars a month to Coinbase while the SEC is trying to put

Coinbase out of business. And they'd have to cross with cross river bank like a bank you've never

heard of. There's the only bank that will actually take the wire. So the CFO of Google is not going to

be so interested in wiring billions and tens of billions of dollars to a crypto exchange as a

custodian. They want state street. They want Citigroup. Citibank is the predecessor to national

Citibank. National Citibank was run by the brother of John D. Rockefeller. It was the Rockefeller

bank. So if you want a sense of how long these relationships run 30 years is a short period of time.

So the third piece we need is we need banks to be able to cost Citibank coin and then

then they can buy it for you, sell it for you, loan money against it. And then in that world,

you will be able to get a margin loan at so far plus 50 basis points against your Bitcoin.

You will probably get 5% interest. You'll probably get the same interest rate on Bitcoin as you

get on a money market fund. And if you had those two things, then a corporate, I was like a hundred

billion dollars of Bitcoin going up 20% a year, yielding 5% with no risk. And a bank too big to fail

is doing the headache for me. You can imagine Apple might say put 50 billion dollars in Bitcoin.

So we don't have that third thing. We're kind of in year one. You could say we're year zero

because year one is when you get the third thing and you get the endorsement without prejudice.

You know, but I would say that's we're six months in. Now you got 50,000 publicly traded companies.

They're all capitalized on toxic credit, which is collapsing. You know, one of the points of my

speeches, if you build your company on a capital asset with a 10 year useful life, your company's

going to last 10 years. And so all these companies have a 10 to 20 year life because they're sitting

on a defective capital asset. The driver for them to switch from bonds to Bitcoin is Bitcoin's got a

useful life of 10,000 years. If you self-custody it your maintenance cost is, you know, one basis point

or something. So the useful life of Bitcoin is thousands of years. The useful life of a bond is

it does in years or 20 years. The regulatory impediment keeps mainstream companies and institutions

from doing it because it's too much trouble. And 2024 is that first year. So the reason that

they're kind of creeping into it right now is finally you can sort it do it. It's a lot of effort

to figure out who you're going to custody with and how you're going to buy it right now. And you

can buy it for 65,000 because you're doing the effort. When JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs do this,

it'll be easy and it will cost $500,000. So you get 85% discount if you do the work and you take a

little bit of risk. If you done it in 2020, you know, you would have got a 98% discount. If you came

in in 2013, you got a 99.8% discount but that was a lot more risk and a lot more work. And you know,

a lot of these institutions, they're just like, if I can make a phone call in 30 seconds and say,

by $10 billion of Bitcoin, they'll do it. But if they have to work harder, they'll study it for three

years. And then they won't do it because why should they take that risk? And so we're in that

transition. But I guess that makes sense to me. I mean, risk reward. I have a friend who always says

the best way to measure how long someone's been in Bitcoin is not how much Bitcoin they own,

but how much Bitcoin they've lost just because it was incredibly risky and also is very easy

to not stay humble and to lose lose your coin on various schemes. I guess where I'm going with it is

and this is something that I'm intimately focused on because of my work at 1031. So at 1031,

we're venture firms that specializes in the Bitcoin space. We have a portfolio of 36 Bitcoin

startups. You know, they're all trying to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. That is their goal.

And I'm trying to separate in my head where at some point, I think there's some companies out there

that are just kind of riding on almost like cheap, cheap, trick strategy. It's like we say Bitcoin,

we accumulate some Bitcoin, they don't actually have a business model. They don't have a competitive

advantage to outperform the hardest asset of all time. And at some point, that evaporates. And

we haven't hit that yet. But at the core, what I look at is low expenses. Keep your expenses as

low as possible. Keep your cash flow as high as possible. And just trying to accumulate as much

Bitcoin on the balance sheet while growing in a responsible way. Would you agree with me on that

front that there's a lot of kind of just say Bitcoin or say AI, right? And as a result, your stock pumps.

And I'm obviously not accusing MicroStrategy of that. I think you've proven that the stock is a

creative. And as you hold the stock, you gain more Bitcoin over time.

I think that every business has got a P&L and it's got a balance sheet. And the P&L is the

operation. That's what you do. And the balance sheet is how you save what you do. And so the people

that have it very easy, the people that can make lots of money right now are just people that started

with the money. Right? If you've already got the money and you just can move it from a bond to Bitcoin,

then you moved it from minus 5% a year to plus 50% a year. And that's not hard, right?

It's very hard to compete with Microsoft. Like it's very hard to compete with Amazon. It's very

hard to compete with Google. It's very hard to compete with Apple. All of those companies are examples

where they wiped out 20,000 competent, healthy, hardworking companies. Like if you have ever been

in the retail business, every single retailer except Walmart got wiped out by Amazon.

There's nothing wrong with those people. They're good people. They work hard. They work

themselves to death. But then the day it's same with Microsoft. They have a monopoly on every,

on 80 million businesses and they sell them their software for three years. And so

so I think that if you're asking me, is it easy to create a business in the modern world? Man,

it's not easy. You can do it. I mean, Mr. Beast can, you know, it happens, right? Random stuff.

But it's it's hard. And it's and if you ask me for advice and entertainment versus medicine,

versus law, versus software, versus whatever, I would say I'm not an expert in any of those things.

I would say probably you ought to look at AI because it's probably going to, you know,

like disrupt and obliterate anything that's labor intensive is getting obliterated.

The distribution is getting disrupted. And so that's hard. On the other side,

the Bitcoin, the balance sheet strategy, it's actually quite easy, right? The reason I talk

about Bitcoin is your choice is lose 5% of your money with bonds or make, you know, if it's 50%

right now, right? My my forecast is on average, the ARR is going to be 25 30% over the next 20 years.

So if it goes to the worst case for me is it's got to go up faster and perform better than the

S&P index. And if the S&P is 10 to 12, then Bitcoin is 20 to 22. So I basically talk about that,

which I know I don't give advice to people on that, which I don't know. And the sad fact is,

if I were to tell you there's a 99% chance of startable fail, I might be overstating your

chances of success. 99% of the S&P 500 is failing right now. I mean, this five companies in the S&P

everybody's saying, how do I keep you with Nvidia? And that includes Apple and Tesla are saying,

I don't know if we can, right? What you will see is a rise of trillion dollar corporations because

someone's going to give all the medical advice to a billion people with AI doctors without an

employee. And whoever figures that out is going to make a lot of money. And it's going to make

medical care cheaper. It's going to put a lot of people in the middle out of business. And they'll

be disruption. So I don't think that Bitcoin is a panacea Bitcoin won't make your startup that

competes with Microsoft compete better. It's not going to make you, it's not going to help you build

better cars than Tesla. The dude that creates the humanoid robot that's as smart as a million PhDs,

that actually you can buy for a hundred bucks a month, they're probably going to sell a lot of

them. And the dude that creates the second best humanoid robot, nobody will want to buy it.

Nobody wants the second best of anything, right? They just want the one, they want the best one

and they're going to sell a billion. So you know, I think the summary of that is sometimes people

think that by doing something with Bitcoin, it will generate a P&L for them. It's like, okay,

I'm going to launch a Bitcoin exchange and I'm going to compete with my with fidelity or with

Morgan Stanley or with Vanguard. It's like just because you sell and buy and custody Bitcoin doesn't

mean it's easy to displace fidelity. And so I think you got to have humility there. And like in

our journey, for example, we got into Bitcoin, you know, we now have $15 billion of Bitcoin,

but I'm not selling the Bitcoin to higher engineers to compete with Microsoft.

See, it would be like throwing good money after bad, right? I mean, so what is a good idea?

Well, I mean, our idea is, secure it as the Bitcoin. There are a lot of people,

they want the upside of Bitcoin, but no downside, right? Have you ever met people? They'd like to

make a lot of money, but with no volatility and no risk. Many such cases. Okay. So how do you buy

Bitcoin at the all time high and not lose money and then make money if it goes up? Well, you buy a

convertible bond. If I sell you a convertible bond with 70% upside that's 5x over collateralized

on the downside and you and if Microsoft strategy guarantees you to give back your principle,

it's like, I'm guaranteeing you'll get your money back in six years, but if Bitcoin goes up,

you'll also get the warrant. And so you're getting half the upside. None of the downs are 5% of the

downside, half the upside. And that's the security. And so if you think about that, we're just

stripping the volatility or we're stripping the risk off the bottom. And there are a lot of people

for which, for example, if you go up to a typical investor and you said, what would you like, 20% return,

no volatility, no, you know, and little risk or 50% return lots of volatility? Most will tell

you 20% even though that's the wrong answer. Right? It's the wrong, I mean, you're going to take 20

instead of 55. Well, I just, I don't want the volatility. So what we do is we simply strip away

the volatility and the risk and give them what they want. But other companies in the Bitcoin space,

if your idea is you're going to create a mobile app that lets you buy and sell Bitcoin,

you're competing against cash app. And cash app is, you know, holding their own, but they're

going to have to compete against Apple and Google and Robin Hood. And look, there are Robin

hoots. I mean, there are successful businesses. But at the end of the day, if there's a theme to

this, business is hard, like launching a business and growing a business is hard. Investing is hard.

When you look at every public company, you try to guess if their stock is overvalued or undervalued,

versus their cash flow forecast, that's hard. It's not hard to say it's good company. It's hard to

say whether the stock price is a good entry point, right? Investing is hard. Saving was hard under the

Fiat standard, but under the Bitcoin standard, if your goal is, I have some money, I'm going to hold

it for four years. That's easy. I buy Bitcoin. If I'm going to hold it for four years, it doesn't

matter what the volatility is. And from there, you know, business is hard, man. Business is,

you know, there's something happening in the world, which is like, how does anybody sell software

to a corporation? If Microsoft, look what they did with Slack, look what they did with Zoom. They

will just take your Slack and make it Teams and put it into their three-year enterprise deal.

And you have to buy it. And they will take Zoom and put it into Teams and put it into three-year

deals, and you have to buy it. And it would be easier for a company to leave the US than to leave

Microsoft. Just like Apple, not that different, right? I mean, how many people want to throw away

their Apple phone and switch to a new ecosystem? They've got your stuff. So business is hard.

They do switch. They switch to Google, right? In both your examples. Like Microsoft Teams,

you go to Google Suite. And what's the third choice? Yeah. Like so business is hard. And it's,

it's not that you can't create new opportunities. But Bitcoin, what Bitcoin offers is you can either

use it to escape the bond conundrum. Or if you're a private company that can raise money,

or if you're a public company that can raise money, you can securitize Bitcoin because there are

large pools of capital that people have where they have to buy a security. For example,

a venture capitalist, they have to buy a security, a participating, a preferred stock,

and a private company that might go public. They have a billion dollars. They can't buy Bitcoin.

They can't buy the ETF. They can't buy land. They can't buy art. They can't buy a public operating

company. They just can't. It doesn't matter whether it's going to go up by a factor of a million.

They can't buy it. Their charter says spend the billion dollars on private equity. So you know,

they can't buy Bitcoin, but you can actually create a company with Bitcoin on the balance sheet

and go sell them a participating preferred stock with half of the return of Bitcoin, none of the

volatility. They don't have to market to market. They don't say, oh, I'm risking all your money

on Bitcoin. They're like, oh, I made an interesting investment in a Bitcoin-based company. They make 22%.

If they get a 20% return and the S&P returns 12, they'll go back to their investors and raise 10

billion more dollars. And the Firemen's Pension Fund will say, oh, you beat the S&P. How much money

do you want? So they need to do that. The guys that buy my converts, when I sell a convertible bond,

I have a one-hour phone call. I'm like, okay, this is the bond. This we're going to do. Okay, they buy

800 million of it and then the day. Okay, why? It's like they have the money. They have to buy a

convertible bond. They can't, they're like, why don't they buy Bitcoin? They can't. Why don't they buy

your equity? They can. They need to buy that. There's a phrase in Law Street. If the ducks are

quacking, feed the ducks. They want that. There's another group of people. They want equity in a public

company. They can't buy the spot ETF. They can't. It's against their charter. They get fired.

They just can't. Why don't they? Well, like you're questioning the world, right? I mean,

then in the day, the world is made up of huge pools of capital and it might have taken 20 years

to raise the money. Now I got to spend the money. So if you are the entrepreneur, my general message

is you can create a security that a capitalist can then use to get Bitcoin exposure.

And if you're a public, you sell public equity or debt and buy Bitcoin. And if you're private,

you'll sell private equity or private debt and buy Bitcoin. If you can't raise money,

then you just got to work very, very hard and get lucky. And it's hard and you'll see a Zuckerberg

on occasion. You'll see some breakthroughs. But it's not easy. And so my recommended strategy is

not work yourself to death. My recommended strategy is notice that there are $450 billion

of capital in bonds and real estate and traditional 20th century assets. There's one trillion.

So there's 450 trillion in those things. There's one trillion in Bitcoin. You should be the conduit

to move the next trillion dollars from the old world to the new world. And the way you do it

is by raising money with issuing securities to buy Bitcoin. And you solve what's the problem you solve?

Custody it for them. Buy it for them. Take away the volatility. Take away the downside risk.

And then solve the compliance issue. Chinese billionaires got to buy Bitcoin through a Shanghi ETF.

Otherwise, he goes to jail. That's the problem you solve. It's not as good as self-custody.

It's not as good as the raw Bitcoin. But that's academic because when you've got $10 billion in

your choices, buy a billion this way or go to jail or don't buy any. The answer, the world is imperfect.

That's what they call it. Earth not heaven.

Wonderful. Michael, we have 15 minutes.

I want to be very conscious of your time. We have a hard stop here. I have 20 different

directions I like this conversation ago. So I hope this is the first of many.

First and foremost, I just want to say, I feel like there's a little bit of an elephant in the room.

Michael and I have had multiple productive conversations in terms of supporting open-source

development. We are not going to go there today. I don't think that's the best path for this

conversation to take. I want to talk to you about your thoughts on Bitcoin as a transactional currency.

Because I think it's super interesting being in the space with you. Because we agree on so much

and we have such different perspectives on Bitcoin. But we end up in the same space.

99% were on the exact same page. The transactional currency piece might be where we differ the most.

Let's just chat about that. How are you thinking about that right now?

Well, if I think about energy frequency and vibration, every time you trade an asset, it's a vibration.

If you're vibrating in a high friction environment or a high impedance environment,

you're bleeding off energy. Things you can do in outer space forever,

you can do in the atmosphere for less and in the water not so much. The real issue is when you're

doing a transaction, what is the impedance? There's a source of physical impedance. For example,

what do I think of gold as a transactional currency? I don't think it's good because it's hard

to subdivide it and it's hard to send it over the mail. You can see how there's a high energy cost

to trade gold high frequency. That's why it died. On the other hand, what do I think of Apple's stock

as a transactional currency? Here, you're just going to do politics. In a country where Apple's stock

was legal tender. If it's legal tender and I can send it to you and you can send it back to me and

I can do it in one second with no tax. Well, Apple's stock is better than gold. Now, what do I think of

the dollar as legal as a transactional currency? Well, what I think is I can send it back in fourth

a million times a day and I don't have a million taxable events. So I don't have to account for it.

If I send a capital asset, whether it's a corporate bond and equity Bitcoin in the U.S., if you're

in the U.S. now, if I move it, I'm moving at high frequency and I'm occurring an accounting event

and a taxable event. If you do the calculation, it just turns out that everything just costs 10 or

20 percent more. If we were talking about a country, El Salvador, where it's legal tender,

and I can move it back and forth 100 times a month and there is no accounting event and there's

no taxable event, then my opinion is if it's Satoshi's on lightning, I kind of like it. If it's Satoshi's

over the base layer, I think at some point the friction is, you know, when it's $3 a transaction,

there's too much friction. So I don't like it on the base layer. I do like it on the second layer,

but I would counsel anybody that if you had a certain amount of money, 95 percent of it should be

held in the capital account as Bitcoin. 5 percent should be in the local checking account.

And as a practical matter, you've got real two things. In Argentina, if everything's priced in

the peso, and then you have to have pesos, I would probably buy them the hour before I had to

spend them, but I would buy them. And on the other hand, if something is legal tender, I'm much more

likely to want to vibrate it or transact at high frequency, and if it's going to be taxed heavily,

short-term capital gains tax is like 35-40 percent. So if I gave you a Bitcoin and it was up

a bit, and here's the thing I think we both agree on, Matt, which is neither one of us think we

should send all our money to the government. Right? Great, cheers.

And I think that's why, for example, Tether has been so successful. I mean, in theory, a digital

currency that's a dollar, and it's pegged to the dollar, for high frequency checking,

and a digital property, Bitcoin, which you can hold for the rest of your life as the property or

the capital asset, those two paired would allow you to go anywhere in the world and stay rich or

stay wealthy and stay compliant and minimize. You want to hold the Bitcoin forever and never

pay capital gains. And you just want to hold it forever, and then you want everything else to

be quick and easy. So that's what I think on that subject. I mean, so you think the tax treatment

is the major hurdle. So it's more of a politics regulatory kind of landscape issue.

I think the government can basically destroy any asset by the tax treatment. Politics matter,

like if they want to destroy it, for example, here's the best tax treatment, legal tender.

No tax on it. You can hold it forever and you can transfer it and there's no tax.

I mean, what's the second best, which is capital gains or property? What's the last best

property tax, which is a tax on time, like you're holding it, and I want 1% of it,

I want 1% of the market value every year, regardless of whether you trade it, right?

And that's the land tax in the US, and that takes your money away from you in 35, 40 years. So I

would say if the government passes a property tax on Bitcoin, you should leave the country.

I would say if they're going to capital gains tax it, you should manage yourself so you don't

have to transfer it very often, almost never. And I would say if they made it legal tender,

then you probably ought to move to that country. You ought to go the other direction. We haven't

talked about inheritance taxes yet, right? But that's the last part. But I do think taxes are 40%

of the equation. They matter a lot. And generally, the best strategies are strategies that allow you

to defer tax or avoid tax and the worst strategies or strategies that accelerate that tax.

You're either going to pay it or you're not going to pay it and then you've got a legal liability

and then you got to worry about that. And then either way, those strategies become a friction,

that they become a problem. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the earliest things you said when you

became public in the space was that that politics matter and people aren't taking them seriously

enough. I mean, I think just the last few weeks alone have proven you right. I mean, just the panel

before us was with our governor and one of our senators. We have the former president of the United

States going to be speaking at the largest Bitcoin conference in the world tomorrow.

Politics clearly matter. I think one of the cool parts about

freedom tech and Bitcoin as freedom money is it gives individuals more power when it comes to

combating governments or not combating governments. Maybe that's too critical of a word, but

defending themselves and supporting their individual liberties. And as a result, it levels the

playing field a bit. And that to me has always given me hope. And I think you've always been really

good. You have hope.com Bitcoin is hope. I mean, we got Larry think out there saying Bitcoin's

like the hedge against hope. It's like the exact opposite to a degree. But I think we can merge.

I think we can merge that. But anyway, Michael, I'm curious. Are we do you think we're entering

the era of nation state government FOMO? Like is is is are we about to start seeing, you know,

the micro strategy playbook happen on a government scale? I think it's it's positive that they're

all talking about it. The over 10 window is shifted a year ago. No one would discuss it. Now you've

got, you know, you got Robert F Kennedy talking about it. You've got a bunch of centers talking about

it. So I just think we start with the conversation. I keep my expectations low. I think we should all

keep our expectations low. But with the observation that when a government starts talking about owning it,

they legitimize it. And that means what they're not talking about is taking it away from you.

So when they're not talking about owning it, like if you look at the German government,

they emergency sold it because it could go to zero. And so the narrative of it's not an asset.

And it's, you know, it's a criminal thing that is going to zero. That thing is pernicious. And if

you want to move forward, you have to put a firm foundation. So I think when the government starts

talking about it, that means that individuals and small companies will feel comfortable enough to

move in. They'll move first. They'll front run. Right. The government's always going to be slow.

It's always going to be ham-fisted. There'll be a lot of fighting. But I think the individuals and

families will move. I think if the government's considering it, it becomes a lot less risky for

you to discuss it in the board meeting. So when I go into a board room and they ask me, I can say,

you know, micro-strategy's doing, but guess what? Here are all the politicians that have this bill.

And the question is, will I get fired if I propose it? So I think the Overton window is shifting.

I'm not expecting, you know, that a government's going to buy a kind of Bitcoin tomorrow and put

it on the wire. I think you have to discount that. I do think we will over the next four years

see some government start to take a position. It'll probably come out of the blue. It'll probably be

someone you didn't expect. And it'll be a good thing. But I generally think this plays out over

EPICS four years. This is the early institutional phase, then another four, then another four.

Yeah, I mean, we've already seen the smaller nations two degrees start Bitcoin accumulation strategies.

Obviously, El Salvador is the one that's on most people's minds. I think it's pretty cool that

you could go to there like Mempool Instance and see they buy one Bitcoin a day, which is like a nice

little meme step chart up. But like even countries like Bhutan that we found out through bankruptcy

reports that they were just quietly accumulating as much Bitcoin as possible. But what is your

given what may or may not happen tomorrow? Do you believe the US Treasury should

stack Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, I just came from a presentation on a stage and what I said was

that the 10% or strategy for the US would be to buy 500,000 Bitcoin, the BTC, the Maxi strategy as

they should buy a million, the double Maxi strategy as they should buy 2 million, and the triple

Max strategy for the US is they ought to buy 4 million Bitcoin over the next four years. They

would have like 18% of the supply. And if they did that, they retire the debt and they flip to a

massive surplus. And my precedent is...

Like the secret to success as a nation state is you have defensible, productive property.

And so the reason that the British Empire rose is they had an island and it was hard to invade it.

Nobody got to it after 1066. And on that island they industrialized. And then they got the colonies

and that was defensible, productive land. And then the reason the US rose the power is the

United States is defended by the Pacific on one side, the Atlantic on the other side frozen

tundered to the north, a desert to the south, defensible, productive. And what we do? Well,

we bought Louisiana Territory, Jefferson did it for 15 million bucks and we bought 27% of landmass,

sewored, bought Alaska, seven million dollars. The United States federal government owns 28%

of the land. In the US we own whatever 18% of the gold or something. So scarce desirable property,

but by productive property that you can defend. And so if hundreds of trillions of dollars are

migrating to cyberspace, right? My view is Bitcoin is going to demonetize Siberian real estate and

Chinese real estate and everything in Africa. And why would you want own bonds of a South American

company? Why would you want to own anything other than Bitcoin? So as the capital flows,

you're going to see hundreds of trillions of dollars there. So if you're the United States,

what are you worried about losing your world reserve currency status? Where's the money going to go

to Bitcoin? How do you hedge that? Just go to go to where everybody's going and buy 20% of it. And

then when they get there, you know, you'll be fine. Where else are you going to go? Right? For

example, if you're going to sell the dollar, or you're not selling the dollar for the peso, the

lira, the euro, nobody wants any of that. So when you sell the dollar, you're going to buy Siberian

real estate? No, you're going to buy Bitcoin. What's the second best? You're going to buy a second

nothing second best. There is no second best. So so the point is you want a country, you want a

country to be capitalized on a firm foundation. The foundation is productive property that no one

can take away from you. And Bitcoin's beautiful. It is productive because the AIs are going to want

to move $10 billion from here to there every hour. They're not going to move $10 billion

of buildings or silver, right? Or dollars. Lord knows they can't get a bank account, right? So

everybody's going to want to capital. If you want to company a family, a country to last and prosper.

How well would your how good would your family be if you owned a hundred acres of the middle of

Manhattan? Like how would you like to own a thousand square miles in Texas? All right, something,

right? Own something productive for a long time. The catch is you don't want me to take it away from

you. You don't want to tax it and you don't want to steal it from you. And the beauty of Bitcoin is

any country puts their money in cyberspace. Nobody can steal it. Nobody else can tax it. So even

though it's brilliant for the US, it's even a better idea for Switzerland or for in Norway or for

Turkey because there's no point in invading your country to take your stuff if all your stuff is

in cyberspace. So I'm a big believer. I think it's good for the network. I think it decentralizes

us further. I mean, it'll be source of a lot of interesting debates and dialogue. But

you know, if you, if you believe you want, if you want to help the US, then give them productive

digital capital. And anybody else you want to help give them the same advice. And if you hate

somebody, if you hate someone, tell them to sell their Bitcoin and don't buy it. Right? That's the

worst you can do to anybody. Encourage them to not Bitcoin because that's like encouraging the

Russians to sell Alaska. It's like an Napoleon sold a third of America for 15 million bucks,

blew it on bullets and blankets in the Napoleonic war. We still have a third of the United States. So

who got the better trade? Bitcoin is beautiful and we should all stack as much as possible.

Stay humble, stack sat. Let's go.