Bitcoin’s $200T Future

You can understand Bitcoin as digital capital.

It is the asset without the issuer.

If it's digital capital,

then it's going to grow to a $200 trillion plus network over time.

The value to the United States is anywhere from

three trillion to a hundred trillion dollars if

the US begins to acquire that network.

As digital capital,

it can negate or retire the national debt,

or it can convert us from owing 40 trillion to owning 40 trillion of net assets.

So it's a very powerful financial lever.

The content presented on this podcast does not in any way represent investment advice.

The information is provided for educational and entertainment purposes.

Crypto assets are considered risky investments.

You should always do your own research before investing.

The opinions expressed here do not represent those of coin desks editorial staff.

Michael Sailor is a leading Bitcoin advocate serving as executive chairman of

strategy formerly microstrategy,

one of the largest holders of Bitcoin with about half a million in BTC in its

corporate treasury.

His bold strategies and unyielding belief in Bitcoin as digital gold have made

an influential and sometimes polarizing voice in both tech and finance.

Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's been an exciting year for you.

Most recently you've unveiled a $100 trillion crypto strategy

at the White House.

You've been promoting it in the crypto industry.

Maybe we can start off with telling us a bit about what's behind this

and why America needs to subscribe to this.

I've been watching the industry for the past four years or so.

I think there's been a lot of confusion, a lot of controversy, a lot of conflict,

and confrontation was all unnecessary.

It was unnecessary because of a lack of vision and a lack of creativity

amongst the policy makers and the participants.

So for example, in a world where the only assets that exist are securities and commodities

and in a world where it's impossible for any innovator to issue a security,

then everything has to be a commodity.

And that means the token is a commodity, a currency is a commodity, a tokenized

security is a commodity, and a commodity is a commodity.

So what we had was people very confused thinking, well, is Bitcoin a currency

competing with the dollar or is Bitcoin something different, a store of value competing with gold?

And then is Bitcoin competing with Trump coin or any other token or not?

And what's the next Bitcoin?

And so I think the crypto industry was at odds.

A lot of people that want to be issues of tokens are forced to go through this kabuki dance

of pretending they're decentralized when they don't really want to be decentralized.

What they want to do is access the capital markets and they haven't had a way to do it.

And we haven't had that discussion.

And my framework that I've laid out, and this is after hundreds of meetings

and talking to people in the Senate, in the House, in the SEC, in the CFTC,

in the White House, every industry participant, all the Bitcoin investors,

all the crypto investors, all the crypto exchanges, all the policy makers,

after lots of conversations and after listening to every word uttered by

Gensler, by all the regulators, after listening to every minute of congressional testimony,

here's my opinion. My opinion is the industry will move forward in a cheerful,

constructive way with the greatest good done for the greatest number of people on earth

if we define four new asset classes. And they would be a digital token, a digital security,

a digital currency, and a digital commodity. And those four new asset classes would rest

atop three 20th century assets, securities, commodities, and currencies. I don't think we really

want to change the definition of 20th century assets. There's just too much inertia. You can't

change 100 years of securities case law. And you don't want to change the way the world trades

commodities like silver and soybeans. And trying to deal with changing the definition of

currency is issued by nation state. That's too jarring. So the right way to handle this is simply

to say we want to allow digital tokens to be issued by 400 million businesses,

ideally in four hours for 40 bucks. Right? And what's the use case of a digital token? It's

for capital creation and for innovation. So let Trump coin be issued, let Katie Perry token,

or Joe Rogan coin, or any token, whether it's a smart contract token, or utility token,

or meme coin, or maybe it gives me access to a music library on a website, or maybe it gets to be

a hyper complicated token, or and or NFT. Some digital utility or some right that just stops

short of being a security. And there's 400 million people that want to do it, and they want to do

it in four hours for 40 bucks. And the reason that they can't issue a security to raise capital

is because securities take 40 million dollars in army of lawyers and accountants in four years.

And then you got to pay 10 million a year to stay compliant. And so and and even after you do all

that, securities would only trade 930 to four on a few markets. They don't trade globally worldwide,

24, 7. So token solved the problem of of giving capital markets access to hundreds of millions of

corporations. And that's a profoundly important thing. If you have no money and you want to start a

business, or you're a podcaster, and you somehow want to raise capital from your customers,

or from investors to change your business, or if you want to innovate and say, I'm going to have

a podcast that has two layers of of access, the free version and the tokenized version. If you buy

the token, you get the inside scoop and you get the comment. And if you if you take the free version,

you don't. So if you want innovation and you want capital creation, you need that, but you need

a legitimate path to do that. And so that's missing. You know, the debate for the past four years was,

well, if you want to be an issuer, then you have to register with the SEC and then of course,

it's illegal to trade. Okay, that doesn't work. Or you can't be an issuer. So if you pretend that

you wish you the token, but then you pretend that you're not the issuer, you don't control it in as

decentralized, I won't sue you. Well, that doesn't work either because the truth is 400 million

entrepreneurs want to issue the token, raise money overnight and use the money to do something good.

So we don't have a digital token asset class in the United States. There isn't one recognized

in the world. We need one. As soon as we have one, you'll see an explosion of innovation there.

How do you balance that innovation with consumer protection? Because we did see this explosion of,

you know, the ICO boom, initial coin offerings where innovators were able to create their own token,

raise money for their projects, but a lot of them, many, most of them, ended up being scams and people

ended up losing money. So that's where we see the regulators coming in and taking their hammer,

perhaps a little heavy handed. What I'd point out there is we should just have a very principled

framework and the observation would be if you want to issue it, you have to actually register

that you're a person, right? You can't have like an anonymous secret organization issue it because

there's no one to sue. So an issuer should actually register the token. They should lay out the

utility. They should there should be a standard data structure. It could be hosted by crypto

exchanges and or by the industry. And then when you when you issue the token, you say this is what

the token, this is who's issuing it. This is how many there are. These are the rules. This is the

utility. And then the issue where ought to be civilly and criminally liable for fraud, you know,

basically do not lie, cheat and steal. And you're responsible for the damage you do. That's

just a biblical piece of guidance. And I think that you just let the free market

determine that because what will happen is if someone does defraud someone or steal, they're

going to get sued. Right? If you issue a token, the results and the death of a person, you're going

to have a criminal manslaughter charge against you. Right? So there ought to be civil and criminal

law and there ought to be consequences for the issuer. But I don't think and here's the point. I

don't think you want to have to take four years and ask permission from a governmental agency

before you issue the token. If you think about the metaphor, you don't have to wait four years

in order to post a tweet. You don't have to wait four years in order to create a product.

You don't have to wait four years to take a trip or drive a car. Like if I told you you had to

wait four years and spend $40 million and there's been 10 million a year on an insurance policy,

before you can drive car because a government regulator wants to make sure that you don't hit some

kid crossing the street. Nothing would move. The truth of the matter is if you hit a child crossing

the street, you are criminally liable and if you slam into someone's bakery, you're civilly liable.

So there are consequences of driving a car, but it seems utterly silly for the government to say

that everyone has to apply for permission to say something or do something, whatever that might be

out of an abundance of caution to protect the consumer. So I think that you should just have

consumer protection laws just like every other product that is created in a free market.

So do you envision a new regulatory agency overlooking this new set of digital

license classes? No. If you were to tweet something that's a lie right now, we don't have an agency,

right? You could be sued for liable or slander. If you if you drive your car into me crossing the

street, we don't have a new agency and if you if you start a bakery and if you bake muffins that

I'm poison in them, right? We don't have a new agency, right? You don't need to create a new

agency for consumer protection. We've already got courts, we've already got criminal statutes,

you're not allowed to kill people, you're not allowed to steal from people, right? So you don't need

a new agency. We've already got the law. So my view on digital tokens is we ought to just let

issuers issue the token and a hold them liable for the damage they do. And egregious examples,

there'll be criminal liability. Someone will go to jail because of the issue that would have

the liability because they're doing, I guess the KYC of the people who want to release these tokens.

The issue would have liability but not for KYC. I think that with these digital assets,

all the digital assets ought to circulate freely, friction free at the speed of light, at the speed

of a computer. So a digital token, a digital currency, a digital commodity, and a digital security,

all should circulate, no KYC, no AML, friction free, that's how you're going to make the economy work.

But the issuer should have liability for fraud. So if the issuer says I'm selling 10 million

coin desk tokens, and then you actually dump a billion coin desk tokens, it's fraud. You could call

it wire fraud, you can call it consumer fraud, right? It's kind of very straightforward. I don't think

we need more. And again, if coin desk issues a token that pays off on the murder of me, right?

Well, that's criminal act, right? So maybe you're breaking a criminal law and you ought to be

liable as the issuer. But I don't think you need any other agency, right? And that's the point

of a digital token. We should see 10 million tokens issued. And by the way, you're right, most of

more fail. Just like 10 million people tweet every morning and most of the tweets don't go anywhere,

and 10 million new mobile apps get created, or millions of chrome extensions and millions of

iPhone apps, most of them fail. Most businesses fail. That's okay. Like 99% can fail, 1% will be

revolutionary and they will change the world. And I think the whole point of the capital market

is people ought to be free to innovate, right? And the problem in a socialist environment where

the government decides is that no one has any freedom to do anything, right? At some point, when

the government tells you you can't create a business, you can't speak, you can't drive a car,

you can't move, you can't create a product, right? You end up with sort of a collapse. So

let me move on from that, though, because I mean, I don't think we want to spend the entire

interview talking about just digital tokens. I think that if you go to digital currency, the real

point is an issuer, a corporation, whether it's circle or tether or bank ought to be able to issue

a digital asset that's backed by currency. So if I want to sell a billion dollars of digital

stablecoin, I would have a billion dollars worth of currency and a bank. It'll all be one for one

backed, right? And that's not the same as a stablecoin. Like it's not USD backed by Luna, right?

It's not that would be a token, by the way. Right? If you create a token which you purport to be

stable at a dollar, I mean, okay, you're kind of a fool to trust it. But if I create a digital

currency, then I issue 10 billion dollars and I buy 10 billion dollars of treasuries and it ought

to be sort of a regulated entity. And the issue are ought to be liable to the government and

ought to be liable to the buyer for fraud, right? That's kind of very straightforward. But then the

but then the digital currency ought to circulate friction free at the speed of light.

And the benefit of that is that the stablecoin industry will go from 50 billion in the US to 10 trillion.

And we will export 10 trillion dollars worth of US dollars to the rest of the world.

And probably everybody in Africa and everybody in Asia will start using the dollars. Maybe the

Europeans will flip to the dollar. It would be great for the world's reserve currency.

And so and it would be great for the 8 billion people on the planet that have to use a defective

currency as a medium of exchange or a short term store of value.

So if the digital economy relies on stablecoins, why do we need Bitcoin? Where does

I know you're the master of the Bitcoin reserve strategy. So tell me where that enters the picture.

Yeah, because if you think about money, money decomposes into currency and capital.

So if you live in Argentina and by law, you're required to pay your tax bill in pesos,

you're going to need ARS, you're going to need local currency. And if the currency is losing 20,

30, 40% of its value a year, then you would hold that for four weeks.

Then if you needed money for the next four weeks to four years,

call that midterm money, you'd probably want to buy the dollar. So you would have in your checking

account USD, you wouldn't hold a bowl of R, you wouldn't hold Naira, you wouldn't hold any of the

really weak collapsing currencies, you wouldn't hold any Syrian or Afghan or Iraqi currency.

So in that case, you always want to hold a US dollar. But if you need to hold the money from four

years to four hundred years, there is no institution or wealthy individual that would ever claim

that the majority of their assets are held in dollars or pesos. They're holding capital assets.

And those capital assets are split between three things. They're either holding bonds,

you might be holding corporate bonds, you might be holding treasury bonds, or they're holding real

estate. You're probably owning a building or property or a home or some other tangible physical asset.

Or you're holding private equity, I own a company, or public equity. I have a portfolio of

Magnificent 7 stocks or S&P index or something. So think about all the wealthiest people in the

world. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, what percentage of their wealth is US dollars?

It's not even 1%. Bitcoin doesn't compete with the dollar. Bitcoin competes with capital assets

in the world. And there are $450 trillion of those capital assets. So think you own a Nigerian

warehouse. You own 1,000 acres in Siberia. You own a private portfolio of Chinese stocks.

You own a bar of gold. Why do you own these things? Because you had to put your money somewhere.

So Bitcoin is replacing or competing with those things. If you look at the M2 money supply, I think

the US dollar was showing as like 13, maybe 17% of that. And the primary competitors

the dollar, CNY, Euro and JPY, Yen, Euro and Chinese currency. So as the stable coin,

as the digital currency back by the dollar starts to circulate, that number is going to go from

17% to 30%. And what we're doing is we're really competing with other world currencies.

And then the Bitcoin asset is less than 1%. And as it grows,

if Bitcoin goes to $13 million of coin, then Bitcoin will go from half a percent or 20, 30 basis

points of the world's capital assets to 13% of the world's capital assets. It will still compete with

real estate, equity and bonds. But it will emerge as like a monetary index for long-term money.

And so that's why it's important to understand this idea of digital commodity. Because the use case

of a digital commodity is not capital creation. That's why all the altcoiners, that's why they don't

get, if you have zero money, you can't buy Bitcoin. So if you have zero money, but you're a

podcaster, you need to issue a token to raise money. So capital creation is a use case of a token.

The use case of a digital commodity is capital preservation and appreciation. If you already have

money and you want to store your money for 100 years without worrying about risk, then you want to

put it in a savings account. And so traditionally, the king commodity as a long-term money was gold.

And what happens is gold demonetizes silver and silver demonetizes copper and copper demonetizes

glass beads. And they all demonetize the giant stone coin of the YAP people or bales of tobacco.

And so Gresham's law says the strongest money wins. In the end, they're can be just wine. We're all

going to go to the strongest form of money. So the strongest form of long-term money,

which I'll call capital, is Bitcoin right now. And all these other assets are going to be traded

in for Bitcoin. And there's no point creating a second or a third Bitcoin because there's only one

network that's going to win. The rest are just going to collapse against it. But the real point here

is you want to commodity to be a store of value. And it needs to be an asset without an issuer.

And so if you look at all these asset classes, what you have is digital tokens and asset with an

issuer with very light regulatory touch. You can issue it overnight. A digital currency is an asset

with an issuer, but it's just pegged to a nation-state currency. A digital security is an asset with an

issuer, but it's really tokenized stocks or bonds. So it's like BlackRock releasing tokenized apple

shares or BlackRock releasing tokenized S&P index. It would be a token that circulates on a crypto

exchange at the speed of light 24, 7 globally, but it is, but doesn't an issuer. And Bitcoin is special

because it's an asset without an issuer. And why would you want an asset without an issuer? Because

you're a company that doesn't want to trust any other company or you're a country that doesn't

want to trust any other country or you're a saver that wants to store your money for 200 years.

And you don't expect any company to last 200 years and you don't expect any government to last

200 years. You just want your family to be rich forever. And so Bitcoin appeals to the people that

want Immortal Capital. And you can see if you lay out this taxonomy, there's four quadrants.

You need them all. You need short term money in order to make payments. You need tokens to create

capital. You need to tokenize securities because otherwise how do you innovate or create more

efficiency in the world capital markets? And then you need a commodity to store and protect your

capital. And once you see all four of them, you realize they should all be designated as

new asset classes. The rule ought to be the issuers have an obligation to lie not lie sheet and

steel. The response with the damage they do. The exchanges should have the ability to trade these

things at the speed of light with anybody or anything, any machine. And then they should have

obligations. Don't lie sheet and steel. Don't don't assume a conflict of interest. And then the

holders ought to have a right to self-custody. You ought to be able to you ought to be able to own

your assets, custody your assets, and transfer your assets freely. So I think that what we all agree

with is there ought to be no AML KYC frictions on asset transfer because that destroys the utility

of all these digital assets. And to the extent that you want to enforce consumer protections or

investor protections, you should put the obligations on the issuers. And that way the economy

starts to grow very, very rapidly. In your plan, the US should acquire 5 to 25% of the total

Bitcoin supply by 2035 to generate between 16 to 81 trillion dollars by 2045. I'm wondering

what has been the reception of your plan at the White House by US President Donald Trump.

And I'd like to hear you talk about why this is a national security issue.

I think the last two weeks have been extraordinary for Bitcoin and for the strategic Bitcoin reserve

because momentum is really building. Two weeks ago, there were three priorities or there were

three things talked about in the digital assets universe, a stablecoin act, right, the genesis,

the genius bill and a bill to create stablecoins and issue them in the US. And that really

addresses the digital currency asset class. And then there's discussion of a market structure bill.

And that's to create an entire digital assets framework, presumably to issue something akin to

digital tokens or tokenized securities, digital securities. And then there is the strategic Bitcoin

bill or the Bitcoin act. That was the third priority. And it was a question mark of where that was

in DC. There was support, but people were wondering. What happened in the past two weeks is the strategic

Bitcoin reserve got elevated to a primary, if not the primary priority with the executive order.

So the president created it. And I think there are some very important things that happened.

On Thursday night, about a week ago, the president issued the executive order,

creating the strategic Bitcoin reserve. And in the executive order designated just Bitcoin to go

in the reserve said we should never ever sell it. Don't sell the Bitcoin. And then directed the

secretary of commerce and treasury to look for budget neutral ways to acquire more Bitcoin.

That was the strongest endorsement of any asset. I don't know, in 100 years, I think, by a president

of the United States. I don't, you know, you could imagine if the president has said we're going to,

you know, I'm directing the government to acquire silver and never sell it. And I want to buy more

silver or pick any asset. It would have been an extraordinary announcement. I think that was

followed up by the digital assets summit. And in the digital assets summit, the president reiterated

those points. And the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of commerce and small business

administration, all were present and reiterated their support. That actually was quite amazing,

along with all of the industry leaders being in one place at one time, you know, and a uniform mind.

I think Friday night, after that summit, I think the most important thing said in this industry

in four years was said Friday night. And I think it missed a lot of people's attention. I don't

think people really realize what happened. David Sacks, the cryptos are, went on the all-in podcast.

And on the all-in podcast, he said unequivocally that the US government only recognizes one

crypto asset as being decentralized. So what Sacks said was Bitcoin is a decentralized asset,

a store of value. That's why it's in the strategic Bitcoin reserve. It's the only one.

And so what you had was was a member of cabinet responsible for digital assets policy.

In essence, providing very clear guidance that Bitcoin is a digital commodity and asset without

an issuer. And that's the policy of the United States and the president of the United States.

And I think for four years, Gary Gensler at the SEC implied that, you know, in a hundred

different ways, implied that Bitcoin is a commodity and nothing else is. But he implied it in a fairly

obscure fashion that was kind of not very constructive because he implied it by suing everybody else.

What you had here was a different administration articulating it, but in a constructive fashion,

because what Sacks said is Bitcoin is the asset without the issuer. If there are other crypto assets

in the future that prove to be decentralized, we will consider them when that when the time comes.

So we're not dismissing the possibility there would be another commodity. But right now, we recognize one.

And our agenda is to provide a legitimate framework to issue digital currencies, digital tokens,

and digital securities. And of course, the president directed that that should come to his desk by

August. He said, I want to see it by August. He's actually said, in the first executive order,

he said within six months, so by late July. But basically, the requirement that there is no issuer.

I don't think any cryptocurrency would really qualify for a administration. No, one does.

Oh, except Bitcoin. Bitcoin quality. But any other ones.

Well, that's been the debate for a decade, right? And it's been a massive debate and a massive

source of confusion, which is, are there other digital commodities? And the position of the

previous administration, Christine, was you're either a commodity, in which case you can trade on a

crypto exchange legitimately, or you're a security, in which case it's illegal. We're going to

sue you, shut you down or jail you. You see, so we had a false dichotomy. And in that world,

where you're either going to die economic, the best cases economic death and your block from

the banking system. By the way, everybody's blocked in the banking system, even Bitcoin.

Sorry. So my god, I'm just, if I'm understanding this, you don't think any other cryptocurrency

qualifies to be in a strategic reserve in the United States, other than Bitcoin, because of its

decentralization and it has no issuer. I think there's only one universally acknowledged

digital commodity in the world. Right? There's only one. There's Bitcoin. I've said that, right?

There is no second best. I've implied that and said that. And I've spent $33 billion based on that.

So yeah, it was my view four and a half years ago. There's one digital commodity. But Christine,

there's a more important point here. Even if there was a second, third and fourth, like let's take

the fork wars, Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin Satoshi vision, even if you fork Bitcoin and you maintain,

that's a commodity, they're all going to zero if the use case is store of value or cap or money.

Right? Because if you were to, if you were to fork Bitcoin and claim its decentralized,

the free market is going to pick the strongest network and it's going to be monetized and everything

else is going to zero. So it doesn't matter from a practical point of view. I don't, my position is not

that you couldn't theoretically create another digital commodity. For example, if China forked Bitcoin

and declared China coin and then said it's legal to mind China coin and it's tax-free to hold China coin

and you can bank China coin in China. In theory, the power of a nation state could create

digital property in China. Just like I, for example, I acknowledge that real estate in China is an

asset without an issuer. I just don't want to own it, right? Like an American doesn't want to own

Chinese real estate. An American wouldn't want to own China coin. But in theory, if you understand

the economic theory of a crypto commodity, you could create it. It's just very unlikely.

At this point, you can ever create a global money that's a crypto commodity because Bitcoin has

a trillion dollars of smart money behind it. And the next best thing doesn't have even one percent.

I mean less than one percent of that. Friends, DeFi is having a moment. Uniswap labs, web app,

and wallet connect you to the excitement. Swapping and bridging our simple, low-cost and lightning

fast across 13 chains, including base, arbitrum, and unit chain, the new layer to network designed

for DeFi. Thanks to deep liquidity on Uniswap protocols, you get minimal price impact on every trade,

now with even greater efficiency through Uniswap V4. Swap, send on ramp, off ramp, and bridge into a

bright future, get started at Uniswap.org. I wanted to touch on the question about why is this a national

security issue? In my speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday, I covered this in a 30-minute

presentation for the Bitcoin policy institute, and I would encourage anyone to go grab that. It's

on my ex profile, I posted it. The point that I make is that there are four different metaphors,

four different ways to understand the Bitcoin network. You can understand Bitcoin as digital capital.

It is the asset without the issuer. If it's digital capital, then it's going to grow to a $200

trillion plus network over time. And the value to the United States is anywhere from

$3 trillion to $100 trillion if the US begins to acquire that network. As digital capital,

it can negate or retire the national debt, or it can convert us from owing $40 trillion

to owning $40 trillion of net assets. It's a very powerful financial lever.

And the companies in the United States, like my company, they're capitalizing on Bitcoin.

They're going to be worth $20 to $40 trillion just on their Bitcoin assets if they continue to

capitalize. So, under so-to-digital capital, Bitcoin is enriching the corporations and the government

itself, depending upon how much Bitcoin does entities own. That's the first metaphor.

The second metaphor is Bitcoin is digital property. If you think of it as gold or cheese,

nobody rents their cheese or mortgages their cheese. But when you think of it as owning

a hundred acres in Manhattan, if your family owned a hundred acres of Manhattan a hundred years ago,

and you owned it this year, and I asked you, what's your family doing with it?

You know, how are you going to pay your bills? You wouldn't say, well, we're going to sell our

property in Manhattan. You would say we're going to rent it. We're going to develop a building on it,

or we're going to borrow against it. We're going to finance it. And so, you would generate

billions and billions of dollars off of a hundred acres of real estate in Manhattan without ever

selling it. It's property. And so, Bitcoin is property means you will be able to rent it,

finance it, or build businesses on top of it in the cyber economy. That would be worth $10 trillion

to the United States in 2045 each year. We could generate $10 trillion off of the digital property

that the United States buys in the strategic Bitcoin reserve. You wouldn't be a national debt.

You would basically flip from being a net debtor to a net creditor, and you would generate yield.

And so, that's a very powerful idea, just like, you know, the company that owns a hundred

billion dollars worth of real estate generates billions and billions of dollars of rental income a year,

or if I have a hundred billion dollars of capital, I can generate five billion dollars a year,

or just loaning the capital out.

Would that crop require the rest of the world to also acknowledge the value of Bitcoin? I mean,

would have China and Russia and other countries, BRICS countries decide to create their own decentralized

currency. They say, you know, Bitcoin is too influenced by the Americans now. Let's create our own.

Yeah, so the point is everyone that's tried it is failed, and everyone that tries it probably will

fail against Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the winner. It's the orange dwarf. It's got the network effect,

and it is the most powerful global capital asset and global property assets. So, if you think about,

let's say, take every country in Africa. You think there's a country in Africa that can launch

the next Bitcoin that won't collapse against Bitcoin. Now, take every country in South America.

You know, as Brazil, we're going to be able to launch an asset that you would want to own more.

No, now take every country in Europe. The euro is the second largest currency, and the best currency

in the world other than the dollar. 99% of the demand for digital currency in Europe is for the dollar.

Okay, so the Europeans can't even compete against the dollar. Will the Russians be able to launch

something? No. Will the Chinese know? Why? Nobody in China wants to own anything in China,

Christine. How do I know that? Because there's a law, right? The Chinese make it illegal to move

more than $50,000 of capital a year outside of China. If the Chinese dropped the capital control,

all of the capital in China would flow out of capital, sorry, out of China. And so there will be

geopolitical jostling, but Bitcoin is already the winner. It's reached escape velocity.

And if the US government begins to acquire it aggressively, not only are they

beneficiary, but they will force every other country on earth to adopt Bitcoin as the global capital.

In fact, what will really happen is the Japanese, the Canadians, the Mexicans, the Brazilians,

all the Africans, all the Europeans will immediately, well, not immediately, they will inevitably,

is the right word, inevitably, begin to convert their physical and financial capital into digital

capital and the Bitcoin network. It becomes a fate of play. They almost can't stop it, right? So

it's one of those geopolitical moves that when you embrace the network, you force all of your

allies first to adopt it and then all your enemies have to adopt it. There's four different

metaphors for Bitcoin. There's digital capital. There's digital property. The third important

metaphor is it's a digital energy network. And the AI economy is going to be built on digital energy

by moving energy money at the speed of light at the speed of a computer. It's a $100 trillion

economy. There is one digital energy network. If you own it, if you control it, you control and

participate in that $100 trillion economy. If you don't, you're locked out of the economy. The

AI is going to think a million times a second and they're going to want to trade a million times

a second with each other. You can't do it without a digital monetary network and that'll be built on

Bitcoin as a settlement network. So the entire future of the banking system and the digital

commerce system and the AI economy, it's all going to be based upon digital money, digital energy,

digital capital. And so that's important. And then the fourth metaphor is it's a digital defense

system because the measure of power in the in cyberspace is the exohash. If you want to create a

system that can't be corrupted, censored, tampered with, or hacked by an AI or by another

computer, you need raw power combined with the power of cryptography, a wall of digital energy

or encrypted energy. And so if I wanted to send $10 billion into a war zone, the only way to do it

is with Bitcoin. If I want to lock down a cyber system against cyber attack where I want to

authenticate it and make a tamper proof, what you want is public private key cryptography embedded

into the Bitcoin blockchain backed by 20 gigawatts of electricity, 850 exohash. No one can crack that.

Right? And we have a situation today where Satoshi could prove to you in one second that they are

in possession of $80 billion worth of capital by simply signing a message with their private key.

That has profound cybersecurity implications for the country. So when you put them all together,

right? Digital capital, digital property, digital energy and digital defense. What you can see is that

you either are going to own cyberspace and owning cyberspace is owning the asset and controlling the

network, you know, controlling cyberspace or your enemy does. And if you lose control of your

airspace, you get bombed back to the Stone Age in one week. You lose the country. If you lose control

the sea lanes, you lose the country. If you lose control of cyberspace, not only can you not send

money between New York and Tokyo, you can't send money between New York and Chicago. You can't even

send money between your computer and the computer in the same room next to you in a secure fashion.

So in this case, the reason this is important to US digital supremacy is the future economy is

digital intelligence. And it's going to need to move digital energy protected by digital power

in order to engage in digital commerce. And Bitcoin is that digital energy network. And that's why

it's in the interest of the US to own it. You're also calling for ending hostile and unfair

tax policies. And there has been word of a zero capital gains tax being applied to Bitcoin and

other American cryptocurrencies, according to your Trump, the son of US president, all the Trump,

wondering what your thoughts are in regard to this.

If you had a tax, a tax that basically taxed everyone when they started a fire or they used

electricity or they put gasoline in a car, you'd pretty much tax yourself back to a Stone Age

Barter society. It'd be pretty stupid. And so taxing digital power, which is the current tax

treatment of Bitcoin miners, we actually tax Bitcoin when it's mined, not when it's sold. We're actually,

it's kind of like taxing, it's taxing an entrepreneur when they come up with a new idea before

anybody buys it. It's it's pretty crippling. So I think we have hostile unfair irrational

tax policies that impair the industry. I think clearly we want to change those. I think that we

have blocked the industry from the banking system. That's kind of foolish. If you prevent banks from

banking Bitcoin, it means the Bitcoin eventually will go to whichever bank in the world is willing

to bank it. All of the crypto crashes, the crypto winner, the failures of FTX and Genesis and

and three arrows and you know block five and Celsius. All of those failures were because the

regulators prevented legitimate banks, well run banks from custodying Bitcoin. And so they drove

everybody to crypto cowboys offshore that were run by entrepreneurs or shadow banks. And

and if they simply allowed actual banks, if they allowed public companies like Apple or Google,

or if they allowed big banks like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to handle these assets,

we wouldn't have had those crypto crashes. We wouldn't have had those failures. Those people

wouldn't have lost their money. And so what we want is a supportive regulation. We want to unwind

all of the hostile, you know, regressive policies which prevent big tech and big banking and big

insurance and big finance from handling these assets. And then we want to roll forward the path

of legitimacy. If you do that, the industry grows by a factor of 100 and the risk to the consumer

and the investor falls by a factor of 100. It's fairly straightforward.

You've said on plenty of occasions that Bitcoin in price is going to go up forever.

In your latest presentation, I saw that by 24 to 45, it'll be about 13 million dollars

Bitcoin. That's the base case and 49 million dollars in a bull case and three million

dollars in a bear case. What in will Bitcoin in your view or will anything derail that trajectory

in your view? No, I don't think so. I think that when I gave that speech, it was Bitcoin

Nashville in July of 2024 and I gave those forecasts. And obviously, I, you know, I gave them,

there's a model Bitcoin 24. It's published. It's on GitHub. Just go Google it, download it and

you can plug in all your assumptions about inflation and innovation. The two big drivers of Bitcoin

price going up are innovation and inflation. Right. Bitcoin's going to go up because capital is

going to be created by technology and as the world gets richer, the capital is going to have to find

home and Bitcoin is going, price is going to appreciate because there'll be more currency, more

dollars, more pesos, more rubles, more everything. And the price is going to appreciate because people

are going to sell their 20th century physical assets and financial assets and the like in order

to buy digital assets. And that trend is going to accelerate as people get educated because why would

anybody want to own a warehouse in the middle of Africa when you could own the equivalent amount

of Bitcoin? They're all going to trade when they can. It's just going to be a question of supportive

institutions. Give me a safe way to buy a billion dollars of it and then supportive regulations

and then education. So these are all things that are simple to predict. And that was my prediction

in July of 2024, but look what happened since then. Right. Since then we had a red sweep. You had a

pro Bitcoin Congress, pro Bitcoin Senate, pro Bitcoin House, pro Bitcoin president. You have every

cabinet member or nearly every cabinet member owns Bitcoin as pro crypto. They're all very supportive.

And now you have a supportive secretary of the treasury. You have one executive order,

directing that we create a vibrant digital assets industry in the United States. You have a

second executive order creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. You have a huge amount of momentum.

What I've seen is a sea change over the past 16 weeks. Most conventional investors and

traditional investors everywhere in the world that were not interested or afraid of this asset class.

They have all flipped their view to being very curious. So I've been invited to conferences in

South America with the 100 wealthiest families for the first time. I've been invited to speak to all

the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds for the first time. I've been invited to speak at

Morgan Stanley's tech conference. The most prestigious one of the tech industry of tech investors.

For the first time, I've been invited to speak at CPAC, a conservative political action committee.

For the first time, I've been invited to the White House to speak to the president of the cabinet

for the first time. There's a whole speech that I gave on Tuesday at the National Press Club

on, you know, there were two senators on stage with me for the first time. What you have is an

avalanche of institutional interest by mainstream policymakers, business leaders, investors.

If you roll the clock back 16 months, none of it existed. The number of institutional investors invested

in spot Bitcoin ETFs went from six to 3,300 over 12 months.

So I would say that institutional adoption is clearly a foot. All of the regulators in the world

will talk about digital assets and they'll talk about Bitcoin. They won't do anything

until Washington DC financial regulators take a position. And so the future of digital tokens,

digital currencies, digital securities, and digital commodities will all emanate from Washington DC

and every other financial regulator and every banking regulator everywhere in the world

will follow. And I'm not just talking our allies, the Brazilians, the Emirates, the Europeans,

our enemies or our quasi-animies or our frenemies. The Chinese, the Russians, everyone is going

to copy the taxonomy and the principles that are set in the United States. And I'm not

speculating. I'm telling you from first-person knowledge because I talk to them. I'm saying I

talk to people in South America and they say our banks will not embrace this until the US does it?

And so the entire industry has been frozen up until November 5th and on November 6th.

We thought things might get better, but if you look at the parade of positive actions that are

good for the digital assets industry, good for the crypto industry, good for Bitcoin,

I think it succeeded everybody's expectations. I don't think anybody expected every member of the

cabinet to be pro crypto, pro Bitcoin. Every member of the cabinet, there is it any, you know,

it's one thing to say, well, we elected a president that stopped suing us, right?

Ended the war on crypto. But we went from a war on crypto to every crypto enforcement action

getting unwound day by day to now a very, very positive, not just positive in an ambiguous way,

positive in a decisive way. We're going to do this. We're going to do this this week. Next week,

we're going to do this. And six months, you better do this, right? That I think is a reason that

everybody in the industry ought to be feeling very optimistic because these are the most auspicious

developments in the last 12 weeks that have happened in the entire history of the industry.

Or it could be a concern if in four years we have a new administration that thinks very differently.

I'm not so concerned about that. I think that Pandora's Box has been opened.

And if you look at these developments, they tend to be one way, just like a hash function is

is one way. There are certain things that once you've done them, you can't undo them. Once you've

seen it, you can't unsee it. I'll give you an example. When the spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in

January of 2024, that opened the entire floodgate and now 3,300 institutions own this. And we went

from nothing to $150 billion. You can't undo that. You know, a future president or head of the SEC

could never say in four years, they'll be $500 billion in these things. They can't say,

well, I just decided that Bitcoin isn't a commodity anymore. It's just it's just too much in one

direction. And once banks start to bank, Bitcoin, when Bitcoin spreads with the banking system and

there's a trillion dollars of digital capital in the banking system, it won't just be in the US.

It's a virus. And so the virus spreads. And in this case, that means you're going to have hundreds of

banks and thousands of banks than trillions of dollars that are held by a billion people.

Okay, so a new president gets elected and maybe they don't like Bitcoin. You can't take a trillion

dollars out of this system. So it's kind of like a new president saying, I just don't think that we

should have the flu. Or I don't think bunny rabbits should be able to romp across the continent

of Australia. You're not going to put the genie back in the bottle. These things are viral.

You know, exothermal, it's a fire in cyberspace and it spreads very rapidly.

There is a question I wanted you to reflect on generally on government. You know, in the United

States, we have these short-term time horizons that change with administrations. We have lawyers,

businessmen, entertainers as presidents, whereas in other countries, they have engineers.

They have 25-year time horizons. Is that a limitation of the American government?

I think if you read the Bitcoin Act put forward by Senator Lomas and Congressman Begich,

they specify a 20-year minimum holding period for Bitcoin.

And the president of the United States has said, never sell your Bitcoin. I think those two

utterances by the politicians most heavily involved here are in incredibly visionary and

auspicious and principled. And so I actually believe that the United States has some very principled

leadership that has an ambition to make this nation great, not make this nation great for four

years. I think the goal is to make this nation great throughout the 21st century.

And thereafter, and I think that's the promise of Bitcoin, digital capital,

it's the promise of digital assets. And I laid out in my strategy, I said, we can create a

hundred trillion dollars of wealth for this nation. We need principled leadership.

We need a rational digital assets framework. And we need to remove crippling restrictions

that prevent innovators in the economy from moving forward as fast as they possibly could.

I wanted to go back to earlier this year. I was at your Bitcoin New Year's Eve party,

celebrating Bitcoin surpassing $100,000. It was a peak moment for many in the Bitcoin space.

It was really interesting going through Vili Vecchia, your home. I saw Bitcoin historical artifacts

that was lapped up by Adredience from 2009. A lot of nautical artifacts. And a lot of this has to do,

I suppose, the nautical aspects. I guess your history of traveling, exploring, and whatnot.

I was wondering what your family upbringing was like.

My father's a career Air Force non-commissioned officer and retired as a chief master sergeant,

the highest and less than rank in the US Air Force. I lived on Air Force bases my entire life.

So it's a military family, a military upbringing. We traveled all around the world. I lived in

New Zealand. I lived in Japan. I lived on a bunch of Air Force bases in the Midwest. I was born in

Lincoln, Nebraska. I went to school at Patrick Air Force Base and satellite beach for a while,

and eventually right Patterson Air Force Base, where I was in high school. So I would say

fairly straightforward Air Force family Air Force brat, they would say.

Then I got an Air Force scholarship and I went to MIT on an Air Force scholarship.

And I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant of the United States Air Force. I ended up serving

Air Force Reserve and I ended up as a captain in Air Force Reserve. So I would say a lot of my

upbringing had that Air Force route in it. Does that Air Force upbringing also talk about or touch

upon some thrill seeking element, some a general in rush in your attraction to Dubit Coin and the

ups and downs of all Tildi associated with it? I think that the Air Force elevates the

and idealizes the engineer. I mean, Air Force is all about engineered aircraft and technology.

So technology is a pretty important principle in Air Force. I think it gave me a lot of appreciation

for flight, for engineering, for aerospace design, for spaceships. And that's why when I went to MIT,

I studied aerospace engineering and spaceship design. And so that gave me an appreciation for systems

engineering and systems engineering. You study higher order systems, feedback systems, servo

mechanisms, cybernetic systems, and obviously mechanical engineering, sub-engineering,

all sorts of engineering, electrical engineering. And so when I finally discovered Bic Coin,

I think I appreciated it as an engineered system. It's full of really, really powerful,

elegant engineering structures that made it stable. Something like the difficulty adjustment

is the first order negative feedback loop, a servo mechanism. It's the same principle you need to

make a steam engine work, by the way. It's the same principle that pops up in all sorts of

machines. And it's a principle in electrical engineering and it's a principle in all kind of

nonlinear dynamic simulations. You need a first order feedback loop. But then the other thing I

realized is Bic Coin is thermodynamically sound money and it's a thermodynamically sound network.

The idea of thermodynamically sound is very important to an aeronautical engineer,

because in order to create airplanes, you normally do all the modeling and engineering based upon

assumptions of adiabatic systems. And an adiabatic system is a sealed closed system. And in a sealed

closed system where energy doesn't leave or enter the system, you can solve all the problems. And so

they say, assume an adiabatic system. And it turns out that if the system is not adiabatic,

if it's not sound and sealed, you can't solve any problem. And so the real genius of Satoshi

was to create a thermodynamically sound monetary system. And if I give you the example, I give you

a bathtub, there's a leak in it, or I give you a ship, there's a leak in it, or if I give you a plane

and there's a hole in the fuselage, you know that's always the theme of the horror movies, the Titanic,

or the window got blown out in the airplane, explosive decompression. All of the catastrophes

are because you don't have an adiabatic system or thermodynamically sound system.

The economic catastrophe that's the analogy here is hyperinflation or the collapse of a currency.

And so all of my engineering background at MIT was how to design systems that are sound that work,

a ship that flies, and a plane that flies, a ship that doesn't sink. You see them in my house

when you see the ships, the ships that don't sink, the planes that fly, Satoshi was a truly genius

engineer. But you could also say Satoshi was simply a competent engineer. Satoshi designed a

monetary system using semiconductors, public private key cryptography, and the internet

that was possible for the first time, sometime around 2009. It was impossible during the time

period of Hayek or Von Mises when all the Austrian economists wrote about this. They didn't have

the technology to design a thermodynamically sound monetary system. So they used gold,

which was an imperfect network and an imperfect asset. It's kind of like

Da Vinci and Michelangelo or maybe Newton and Leibniz. They're genius scientists and they want to

design an airship. But if you don't have an internal combustion engine and petroleum, you can't

make an airplane. The Wright brothers had petroleum and a motor and internal combustion engine

and they could create an airplane, maybe not so theoretically genius, but practically they made us

fly. So Satoshi took all of the math, all of the engineering, all of the monetary theory that came

in the hundreds of years or thousands of years before him or her and created perfect money.

And so I think my background drove me to go to MIT. My education was as an engineer and as a systems

engineer. By the way, there's another important point. Aeronautical engineers are probably the greatest

of all systems engineers. Because to create an airplane, you have to master civil engineering,

mechanical engineering, metallurgy, you have to master electrical engineering, stability.

And if you get anything wrong, the plane crashes and burns. And for example, you have to build an

airplane with aluminum, even though the best material is steel, because steel is so heavy,

the plane crashes. You can never fly a steel plane. And so you have to make a compromise.

And the compromise is, I have a plane that flies, but it's not as strong as steel. When you're a

civil engineer, you use steel, but the building building doesn't fly. So if you apply that to money

and Bitcoin, Bitcoin was an engineered system with compromises. Like, well, why can't you just

query the transactions every five seconds? Well, because it's not stable, right? If you want it to

be stable, then you have to query the transactions every 10 minutes. And so, well, why can't you just have

infinite block space? Well, because then it's not stable over time and the security collapses.

Well, Satoshi understood that if you wanted it to be stable in time and space, there was a limit

to what you could achieve. Just like, well, why can't I just have a hundred story building the

flies across the ocean? Well, a civil engineer wouldn't know why you can't, but a

neeronautical engineer would be able to explain exactly why you can't fly a hundred story building

across the ocean. Right? And so my background, I think, calls me to look at Bitcoin and appreciate

the beauty of the engineering. And whereas someone that doesn't have an engineering background might

say, well, I'm just going to hack together something which is smarter, faster, quicker, and easier.

And you end up with all the other all-coin experiments. But what they don't do is they don't appreciate

the thermodynamic physical mathematical and systems limitations over time and space

that a really good system is an engineer would understand. And so I think that that all brought

me to where I am today. And it caused me to look at this thing and say, oh my Satoshi created the perfect

monetary network, you know, for the world. And it's like someone gives you steel, you want to

build Manhattan. Someone gives you aluminum, you want to build an Air Force. And so I see Bitcoin

and I sell perfect money. What am I going to build? And so far we've taken our company, you know,

with a billion dollar market cap and built into an 80 billion dollar company just by building

off of what I view as crypto steel. Friends, DeFi is having a moment. Uniswap labs, web app, and

wallet connect you to the excitement. Swapping and bridging our simple, low cost and lightning fast

across 13 chains, including based arbitrum and unit chain, the new layer to network designed for

DeFi. Thanks to deep liquidity on Uniswap protocols, you get minimal price impact on every trade,

now with even greater efficiency through Uniswap before. Swap, send on ramp off ramp and bridge

into a bright future, get started at Uniswap.org. Well, I was at your place. I saw one of your super

yachts. It's called the Usher. And someone there said it referred to one of your greatest failures.

So I want, I was curious, why would you name a ship after one of your greatest failures? And

what you learned from that? Back in the mid 90s, I bought up a bunch of domain names,

names like Usher and Hope and Michael and Mike and Speaker and Angel and Voice and Strategy.

Because I thought one day you could build businesses on these because they're great words

in the English language and everybody knows how to spell them and say them and they're very powerful

brands. And I had some singles and some doubles. You know, I launched some things. I sold

Voice for 30 million and I sold Angel for 100 million and then we launched Alarm.com and

that's a multi billion dollar business. But then I launched a business called Usher on the Usher

on the Usher domain and it was going to be a mobile authentication application. So it was a

mobile app that was multi factor authentication that you could use to seamlessly log into a website

or authenticate a transaction. Whether it's a financial transaction or a ticketing transaction. So

it was this idea of public private key cryptography and a consumer app because you couldn't

rely on it. And we wanted to replace passwords. Right, passwords are garbage. Everybody knows

passwords are garbage. You could almost think of it as like it's a software version of a

signing device like a Bitcoin wallet or hardware wallet. But we did it back in 2012. We didn't

have the distribution channel and it turned out that it was an idea a bit ahead of its time.

And ultimately what happened was Apple just kind of built login with Apple into their iPhone

and then Microsoft issued Microsoft Authenticator and they just gave it for free to 100 million

businesses. And Microsoft Authenticator has got like one one hundredth of the functionality of Usher.

But what I learned, right, what did I learn? Well, first of all, it failed, right? I thought it was

going to be a multi billion dollar thing and I named the yacht Usher while I was launching it. I

didn't name it after it failed. I named it because Usher was mobile identity and I thought it was

kind of cute to name a yacht after my mobile identity and it made a good name and you can read

the sign from a long way away. So it's a good handle for a boat for safety reasons and practical

reasons. But what I learned from the endeavor is, you know, sometimes you can overthink things.

Like you're better off, the winner in that market was Microsoft and Apple or Google.

Like people log in with Chrome, they log in with Apple, they log in with Microsoft Authenticator.

The winner is the simple brainless idea that has just enough functionality, replace the password,

that you have the distribution channel for. You can you can jam it down a channel to a billion people

or bundle it. And we were like the innovator with this, you know, Swiss Army knife that did

everything, but we didn't have the distribution channel and it was a little bit before it's time.

So it's, you know, I would say generally Christine, maybe one of the things that made me appreciate

Bitcoin is I had, you know, I probably came up with 20 ideas that I thought were the best idea ever.

You know, I went through this period, you know, from your 30s to your 50s, you're like, I'm going to

invent this, I'm going to invent that, I'm going to invent this. And whenever you invent something,

you think it's the best idea ever. And then then you don't know it isn't until the market tells you

it isn't. And the market's going to tell you, you know, most of them will fail. A couple may achieve

a hundred or a tenth of what you thought. Occasionally you get you find a really good idea,

but you shouldn't be so proud that you're not going to embrace somebody else's idea if it's better.

The great irony, right, the great irony of life. And Elon Musk says he says sometimes the most

ironic outcome is the most likely outcome. The irony of life is after 30 years in business,

after I created 20 ideas and after some succeeded and a lot of them failed. My biggest success is

somebody else's idea, right, when we trip, and I wasn't even looking for it. I was, you know,

I was kind of kicked in the back by a golden horseshoe, if you will. And so during the lockdowns,

we had a problem and we discovered Bitcoin and that was Satoshi's idea. And we kind of just grabbed

it, you know, defensively because the choice was either that or a quick death or a slow death. So

it was really like a life raft or a, you know, life preserver. And then it became an opportunity.

And then it became a strategy and then all the sudden in the past 12 months, we realized it was a

really good business. We could build a really good business on it. And it wasn't our idea and I

didn't invent it. But the truth is we made a hundred X as much money for our shareholders and our

employees and our, and everybody involved as all the things that I invented. And so yeah,

that yacht behind the yacht kept the name usher. It reminds me of something that I thought was

a brilliant idea, but it didn't turn out that way. And it reminds you that even when you think you're

a hundred percent right, you know, it's quite possible that you're not. And you probably

ought to have the humility to appreciate other people's thoughts on the matter.

What advice would you give to a younger version of yourself?

First of all, embrace the new platforms of your generation that are going to change the world,

right? So don't do what your parents did or your grandparents did because they might have been

insanely successful. And all your role models may be insanely successful, but

but they did something which made sense in the 70s or the 90s, you know, or the 2010 time frame.

You ought to actually think for yourself and figure out what is going to be profoundly earth

shattering? What's going to change the world and create prosperity for the human race in the next

20 years or 30 years? And then, you know, and what are those themes right now? They seem to be

digital intelligence and digital energy or digital money or digital capital, whatever you want to call

it, digital assets. And so start to study them, think about it, think about the consequences of

that, make your own path, and then focus. And once you focus, figure out what you're going to do

and be the best in the world at that. And I think that if you look at the classic pattern of

of failure of an alpha male, and I'm just going to single out alpha males because I am one,

an alpha female could make the same mistake. It's in your 20s, you struggle to be successful,

and then you succeed at something. Like you launch a business, you're a famous podcaster,

you know, you build out a niche, you're the greatest digital assets reporter. And then it goes

to your head. And then you think, well, now that I've conquered this, what new thing am I going to

conquer? And so then you expand and you launch the second business and the third thing and the fourth

thing. And you know, maybe everybody in the world wants to understand your opinion of digital currency.

And then you think that they're also going to want to know your opinion of cooking and music. And

you're going to be a movie critic. And the truth is they probably don't, right? Like if you,

if you're lucky enough to be relevant in one thing in the world, you've already won the lottery,

right? If you actually carve out a position where people acknowledge you is having a

useful opinion or useful service or useful product, then you want to lay, you know, put on laser

eyes, right? My advice is laser eyes. Once you figure out what you're, what you enjoy, what you're

good at, what's going to change the world, you ought to laser like focus on it. Don't take it for

granted because so often people take it for granted, right? Napoleon ended up, you know, he ended

up taking over France at a young age and brought peace to France. And he could have said, well,

that was a one in a million likelihood. Like how many people in the history of France ever actually

stopped the revolution, brought peace and security to France. And instead he thought, well, I just

got a conqueror, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Sweden, you know, et cetera. And of course, the

result was ruined and he and he accomplished nothing other than to get 20 million people killed.

That's the Napoleonic complex. And I think I can't tell you how many companies they come to

their end because they have one successful business and then the diversify and they launch the next

four. And it's the same problem a parent has. You have a child and they're and they get in their

20s or their teens and they don't turn out the way you wanted. So you think, well, I'll just start

on another one and they will do it. And what people forget is that the common element and the

relationship is you and people always blame all of their problems on somebody else. And I think that

the mature view is you look in the mirror and you say, I'm struggling in business. I'm struggling

with what I'm trying to do. If you say, what is it that you're not doing that's keeping you for

being successful and then you focus and were to fix yourself. I think that's always much more

constructive. And when I think when you say, well, the customers are stupid or the investors are

stupid or the market's stupid or someone else is stupid. So I'm going to do the next thing. I mean,

when you're in denial, I think you tend to just go and you pick a new thing and you never really can

develop a core strength. So I would say, have a laser focus on something. Be humble.

Don't assume that just because you've been successful in one field, you can replicate your success

in 10 more fields. So I even Michael Jordan when he played baseball, he was a mediocre baseball player.

He was the greatest basketball player, right? And the world's full of it's full of people that are

extremely talented, extremely intelligent, that are laser focused. And so if you're extremely

talented and extremely intelligent, but you're not laser focused, you're probably going to get displaced

in the world. There's no doubt that you are laser focused on Bitcoin. You've had a lot of

opportunities to take money out of Bitcoin and profit, but you're not doing that. You're only

accumulating. So I'm wondering, what is the purpose of all this accumulation in the end? Do you

want to be a Bitcoin bank? I've heard words of that or there'll be a point in time where you'll

have a lot of influence on the Bitcoin network and having accumulated so much, what are you going to

do with all that influence? Bitcoin represents the most certain thing in the financial universe,

right? And Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough in a place to stand. I can move the world.

Bitcoin is the place to stand. I'm not trying to change Bitcoin at all. I'm just standing on it.

The question is, what am I doing? I'm trying to digitally transform the capital markets.

The world that I'm changing is a traditional finance world. And here's my observation.

Equity, capital markets, for the most part, value companies based upon a promise and expectation

of future cash flows, which another way to say it is, the companies have no money, but they promise

to get some money over the next 20 years and we estimate how much they're going to get, and that's

the value of the equity. Our company's position is we actually have the money, right? So we have

the money now. Maybe you can value us a premium, but right now the company is 65% or 6% of the market

capital company is the money. Whereas if you look at a typical company like Apple or Microsoft,

5% of the company is money and 95% is just expectation that they might get money in the future.

Why is that? That's because money is toxic if you're using bonds, treasury bills as a capital asset.

So if the money the corporations hold is toxic, if it generates a 3% after tax return,

and if the cost of capital is 13%, then you destroy 10% of your capital a year. That means that

every conventional company is capitalized on toxic money. And so my mission is to capitalize companies

on virtuous clean money, right? And if you look at the fixed income markets,

this is even more profound. Think about this for a second, Christine. A company, a corporation

borrows money because it needs money. And so I borrow a billion dollars, but I don't have a billion

dollars. That's why I borrowed the billion. And my credit rating is based upon my cash flows

or my EBITDA. So the credit rating agency says, well, you don't have the billion, but you have

a hundred million cash flow. And so over the next decade, maybe you'll get the billion.

So I'll give you a credit rating. So your credit rating is based on the money that you expect

to get to pay back the bond. Okay. We're in the market with $10 billion

or say we have $45 billion of actual money. And we want to borrow a billion. And a credit

rating agency would say, well, you don't have any cash flows. So we don't know if we can give you

a credit rating. And of course, the joke is, well, we actually have the money. We have 45 billion.

We want to borrow a billion. Or I have five billion in collateral. I want to borrow a billion more.

I'm 5X over collateralized. You could literally give me a credit rating based upon the money I have.

But the entire fixed income market, which is $300 trillion of corporate bonds, preferred stocks,

structured instruments and like that entire credit market is based upon credit ratings and the

theory of credit that's based upon loaning to companies that don't have any money to pay it back.

But they promise that they'll get the money in the future. So my company is issuing bonds

and issuing preferred stock that's backed by Bitcoin. And our mission is to create a new theory of

credit. Right. We want to issue billions than tens of billions, then hundreds of billions,

then trillions of dollars worth of credit instruments that are backed by real money. And

and that's what we're doing right now. We're the largest convertible bond issuer in the world

last year. I would like to be the largest convertible bond issuer this year. And those convertible

bonds are the highest performing most sought after bonds in the world because they're backed by

by Bitcoin, by real money. You know, other people that issue convertible bonds don't have any money.

They're they're actually just backed by future expectations of getting some money.

And we just issued this convertible preferred stock called strike STRK. That's the first convertible

preferred instrument ever backed by Bitcoin or any crypto asset. And that's the best performing one

as well. And then we announced the $21 billion shelf registration. That's the first time anybody

in the history of the capital markets has ever attached a shelf registration to a preferred stock.

Okay. So what are we going to do? We're going to sell billions of dollars of preferred stock

to a market. And it's going to be twice as good or three times as good as the existing preferred.

So preferred stock investors get a benefit. And then we're going to buy Bitcoin and our common

stock shareholders are going to get a benefit. And the Bitcoin network is going to grow. And the

entire crypto economy is going to grow. And so the long long term plan is just securitize the entire

market. And last year we raised about $22 billion a capital. If we can raise $22 billion then $40

billion, then $80 billion, then $160 billion, then $320 billion. We'll just keep raising more capital.

And you would say, well, when is it going to end? Well, when we've got 1% of the fixed income

market, that's going to be $3 trillion, Christine. And then it won't end. When we get 1%, we'll be going

for 2%, and then we'll be going for 4%. So there's really no reason to ever end. And you're like,

well, what is the value you're creating? And the answer is we're giving all the fixed income

investors an extra 200 basis points of yield every year with less risk. That's the value we're

creating. We're basically rationalizing the equity capital markets and the fixed income

capital markets. We're improving the credit quality. And we're improving the returns. Because

like, for example, if you're holding $5 billion a Bitcoin and you show a billion dollars of

credit instruments and the Bitcoin is trading with a wall of 60, there's like an 80 to 100 basis

point risk that you'll be under collateralized in 12 months. That means that you ought to have

investment grade credit. But the market's paying, trading in like junk. So we can pay junk bond

rates and offer investment grade credit. And someone gets an extra 400 basis points of boost.

And we can afford it because our use of proceeds invest in a network that pays 30 to 60% a year.

And then they benefit. And so what we're really doing is we're digitally transforming the

capital markets to the benefit of everybody involved. I want to just push back with what critics say,

which is that if Bitcoin has a massive downturn, which has happened with the volatility,

draw downs of 90% and there's less interest in MSCR bonds or equity. That forced the company to

sell Bitcoin at a loss to cover its debt, potentially unraveling the model. And they also could

decide the stock's premium. It's often trading far above its Bitcoin holding net asset value.

Is that seen as a bubble right for bursting a faith in the strategy falters?

Yeah, we've learned a lot over the past four years. And I think we're built an indestructible

balance sheet. Right. If you think about what we're what we're issuing, we're not borrowing money

as on a junk bond or a senior bond that comes due in five years. We're actually issuing a

preferred stock, which is a perpetuity. You know, you don't hear the word perpetuity that often.

It means that we're never paying the money back. Like when we when we sell a billion dollars of a

preferred stock, we're borrowing a billion dollars forever for a thousand years. So it's a perpetual

swap. And and it's a perpetual swap with no covenant. So Bitcoin could trade down 99%.

There's no, I mean, people talk about margin call on X. There's no margin call coming.

This is not happening. Right. The instruments that are constructed, you know, don't have Bitcoin

pledged as collateral. And so we could take an 80 or a 90 or a 95% drawdown.

We'd be just fine. Right. What we've done is we've constructed the business such that the leverage

for the equity comes from from intelligent sources. And the most intelligent source is is

clearly preferred stock. Right. Because it's like all the leverage you get from a bond, but none of

the liabilities of a bond, right. Someone's going to give you money forever. You never have to pay it

back. Think about it. Right. It's like, why if I offered to give you money forever, and you

would never pay it back. And you know, your friend said, well, don't take it because you might get

liquidated. If your investment, you know, draws down 75%. You're like, yeah, but on the other hand,

I expect it to go up by a factor of a hundred. And if I take the billion dollars, all have a hundred

billion dollars. And if I don't take the billion dollars, then I'll have nothing. So and by the way,

it's like there's no liquidation risk. So so these are just they're not really that risky

instruments. It's very intelligent leverage. And the more important point is that this is an

engineered company. The leverage that's generated by the convertible bonds is beneficial to the

equity. And the volatility of the equity is beneficial to the convertible bonds. And the leverage

generated by the preferred stock benefits the equity and the convertible bonds. And the more

preferred we sell, the more strike we sell, the more leverage and volatility for the equity,

which is beneficial to the options traders, which drives up the premium and the equity,

which drives up the premium and the price of the converts, which opens up the convert market,

which drives up the price of the preferred stock, which loops back into the capital market. So

everything is is reflexive or engineered to feed back into everything else. It's like an engine.

And if you were to say it sounds like financial engineering, it absolutely is financial engineering.

We've engineered a machine where it's almost quadratically reflexive because when we sell strike,

it creates more more pressure to drive at the price of Bitcoin, which drives up the price of

MSTR, which drives up the leverage of MSTR, which drives up the value of the options, which drives up

the demand for the equity, which drives up the demand and the value of the converts, which drives up

the price of and the demand for the preferred. Right. And so you're like, the risk is what Bitcoin

trades down. And as I've explained, there are no covenants, no warrants, no leans, no liquidation

rights. You know, and the truth of the matter is Christine, we want Bitcoin to be volatile.

Like things that are when it's volatile, like our volatility is 100, we're the most volatile stock

in the S&P index. That makes us the most desirable stock for a trader. If the volatility goes away,

then it's probably not good for the equity. Want market moving insights at your fingertips?

Download the CoinDesk app for news, prices, videos and events on the go.

Would you ever consider buying back strategy stock instead of Bitcoin using strike ATM,

or would you use some of the proceeds from the convertible bonds to pay the dividend on strike?

I think we just keep every option open. And we'd never rule out any option. But generally our view is

when the equity capital markets give us a massive premium, we'll sell the equity. When the convertible

bond markets give us a massive premium, there's massive demand. We'll go sell the converts.

And when the preferred markets have a massive demand, we'll sell the preferred. And our general

strategy is just keep acquiring Bitcoin, never sell the Bitcoin. And then we will adjust our various

capital markets activities. If we get too delivered, we'll sell more levered instruments, fixed

income instruments. And if we get too levered, we will deliver. And if we feel that the capital

markets aren't really favorable to sell any securities, we'll just stop and wait. Because if I did

nothing right now, if we did nothing, we have a $45 billion company growing 60% a year.

Which is better than every other company in the world, there might have been,

find me another $45 billion company growing 60% a year by doing nothing.

So we have a good option to do nothing. Our company's stock has been, we've been growing 95% a year

right to our equity shareholders. And the more the most sophisticated thing we do is

a very delicate balancing in order to optimize the interest of every stakeholder. I mean, every

every creditor, the bond holders, we in essence have six different convertible bonds, a preferred stock

and the equity. And we're content. I will say we are very much thinking about those eight classes

of security holders, like those things keep me up at night. I will say for the record,

I don't worry much about people that are trading out of the money 30 day call options. So

if you're a guy that's trading 30 day call options, you know, with 20X leverage, like, you know,

we are not partners, I might do something that undermines your short dated option position.

Our goal is over the long term to create the most shareholder value we can for the common stock,

but to treat every other class of security holder with respect and be very, very transparent and

give them exactly what we promised to give them in the most responsible way. I know you're buying

forever, but maybe you can give folks a timeline that you expect to issue the full 21 billion of

strike ATM, considering you went through 17 billion of the 21 billion in five months. And when the

plan was three years, and are you expecting to issue any more convertible bonds by the end of the

quarter? So Christine, if you were to go to business school, I would say you could save your time

because I can boil business school down to the following phrase, keep your options open.

Right? The entire essence of business is keep your options open, right? Those four words. So

you're asking me to commit the cardinal cent in business, which is close off all my options,

which would be foolish. I would say moronically insane and stupid. So no, I would never, ever commit

to doing something. What I would say is the way we run the company is we create the most

optionality as possible. We could sell 21 billion dollars worth of strike next week.

If the demand was there under the right terms, we could sell it never. We could sell it over three

years. We could sell it over one year. And the presumption that I know when I'm going to sell it,

it's a mistake. Here's the mistake because generally you can sell a certain amount of securities

in a time frame. I could sell a billion dollars of equity tomorrow, but at what price?

And so if you specify the time frame and the size, you have to give up the third variable,

which is the price. And so if I wanted to tank the stock, I could make the commitment. So making

the commitment is really dare election of duty because you're undermining the interest of your

own shareholders and you're undermining your negotiating position. So if we look at our 21 billion

dollar ATM for equity, we announced that October 30th. We had the option to take three years.

Well, what couldn't we predict? Well, we can't predict how enthusiastic the equity

capital markets will be. We can't predict who's going to win the election. We can't predict how

enthusiastic the market will be after the election. And so we created the option to sell a lot of

equity in a hurry. What happened was a parade of wonderful developments, the markets rallied,

Bitcoin rallied. We were able to sell 15 billion dollars of equity with the stock price and the

premium strengthening every single day. But we didn't know that on October 30th. Now if you were say,

well, you should have promised to do it in 36 months and you should have done it every day for 36

months. Well, you'd be a fool because you had a chance to basically do, you know, to generate a 10

billion dollar gain with no risk in four weeks. And so if I said, I'll give you 10 billion dollars,

no risk in the next four weeks, or you can take three years and maybe in the third year, you'll get

a five billion dollar gain, but that way you won't have surprised anybody. Well, that's stupid,

right? So if someone offers you 15 billion tomorrow and you're going to make 10 billion dollars on

the trade, take the money. That's my advice to you. But if you promise to do it tomorrow, the stock

will go to one dollar because everybody will frontrun you and then you can't do it. So with all of

these things, the key is we create optionality. If I were to promise you, guarantee that we're going

to issue certain amount of convertible bonds this year, I could do it, but at what price to my shareholders,

it would probably be deluded. So what you have to do is you have to open up your options, you have

to be very nimble. Every day we evaluate the market, there are certain days when the Bitcoin

markets are favorable, sometimes the equity market is favorable, sometimes the convert market is

favorable. By the way, Christine, there are weeks where we could sell a billion dollars of a

convertible bond with a four-year tenor, but not with a six-year tenor. Like the market to sell

four-year bonds is open and you can do that for zero coupon, and the market for a five or a six or

seven-year bond is slam-shut in your face and you can't do it. Or you can do this, it's going to

cost you 10% or you can do that and it's free. So the real key is the capital markets are multi-dimensional.

I'll give you one more metaphor. This is what you learn if you're a nautical. If you ever

sail a sailboat or cruise in a yacht, it's like you get up in the morning and you say,

I'm really excited, I want to go to the Bahamas. It's only three hours away. If the wind is blowing

in one direction, if it's blowing from the south to the north, the Gulf Stream lays down like a

mirror glass and you can go across it and you wouldn't even notice it and you'll be there in three

hours, sipping your peanut collada, quite happy. If the wind changes direction and it's blowing

from the north to the south, you get a standing wave against the Gulf Stream. You're going to have

10 or 20-foot seas. If you get there, you'll get there with broken arms. Someone will fall

on off the ship. And the point is, if the wind changes direction and if you're smart, you're not going.

If you're full, it's like the scene in the Wolf of Wall Street where the guy takes his yacht out

in the middle of a mistral and the ship sinks, it's like, if you have a strong ego and you've decided

you absolutely must do something but the winds and the Capitol Market's chain direction, it's not

going to turn out well. Humility is, you chart your path based upon prevailing winds and currents.

And that's why the naval greeting or farewell is fair winds and following seas.

There's a direction to go. You go that direction and if you go that direction, it's going to be a

lovely time and you're going to have extraordinary success. But when your ego gets in the way and you

make some plan and you declare you're going to do a come hell or high water, you're going to slam

into a wall of water and mother nature and it's just not going to work. And so I don't give that

kind of guidance because it's just unwise to do it. It would be not in the best interest of my

shareholders or stakeholders and that's not the way to run a business, right? What's the difference

between corporate chisories that don't hold Bitcoin in those that hold a million, five million,

10 million. And when do you see the Fortune 500 companies really getting into the Bitcoin

corporate treasury game? We seem to be adding one or two companies a month right now. There's 70

on the hot all list. I think we'll probably get to 100 at some point. I think it'll grow exponentially.

We'll get then we'll get to 200. Maybe we'll get to 400. Four years from now, maybe 10% of companies

might 5 or 10% might be 4 to 8 years. The thing that slows it down, this slows on institutional adoption

is you have to have a company with a need. So well run companies that are conventional don't have a

need to change and so they'll be resistant. And then also you need institutional great custodians.

You need to have major banks that are banking all these companies. They have to hold Bitcoin

and sell it. So I think that corporate adoption will accelerate once JP Morgan and Bank of America

and city and Wells Fargo and the like once they're in the space and that will ripple everywhere in the

world. And initially it'll be small amounts like 5% of my treasury or 10% it'll start to go like that.

The really big companies, the big tech companies will probably be the last ones to embrace it because

they have the least need. This is a perverse irony. The better the business is, the less likely

you are to adopt this new innovation because you don't have a need. It'll be the zombie companies

that have a need that have an open mind. In the 70s, who embraces rock and roll music? It's the

teenagers and the 20s some things who want to make a name for themselves. They want fame and fortune.

And they're not going to go be conductors in Carnegie Hall. And in the 65 year old Carnegie Hall

conductor, the Bernstein or whatever, who's theoretically the better musician, they're not going

to pick up the guitar. They have nothing to prove. They've got a life of success based upon a

different paradigm and a different set of techniques. Bitcoin is a solution for the Gen Zs,

for the millennials. Whenever I go to a conference, if I go to a conference of 100 rich families,

it's the 20-something sons that know me. I'm a rock star with the 20-something and the 30-something

sons of billionaires. They all know me. And they're like, oh yeah, you've got to talk to my

my grandmother. You convince my dad, my grandfather, etc. They won't listen to me.

I think that you're going to see it trickle up from the small companies and from the newer companies

run by the innovators. And then gradually, the next group and the next group. There's something

very equitable about it. It's like, do you really want the rich, powerful, successful people,

the arrogant ones that have everything? Do you really want them to be the ones that get rich off

of this? They don't need it. Why should they get the benefit? What you want is for the people

starting their career or for those who are hopeless. Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor.

The people that don't have a chance, you want them to be to benefit shareers. And so I think

they're the ones that will embrace this. And it'll be progressive over the next 10 to 20 years.

What does ultimately the future of digital finance, where is it headed, and how do people work and

transact in this future? The one thing that we have universal consensus on is that Bitcoin is

digital capital. And it's a digital commodity. And you can own it and hold it forever. And it

will be beneficial to you. And that's a solution to every family and every company on earth right

now. And that's, we have clarity on that. The future of digital currencies, digital tokens, and

digital securities should be 80 to 90 percent clear. Once we have this digital assets framework

or the market structure act sometime in the next six to 12 months. So hopefully by the end of

2025, we have clarity from the US regulators as to what you can do. Like how much utility can you

put into a token, who can issue a digital security, who can issue a digital currency, how much,

how much friction will there be on those things? Once we have that, then I think we can have a very

interesting conversation about what the consequences or implications of that are the entrepreneurs.

What's Apple going to do with digital currency and digital securities and digital tokens and digital

capital in the iPhone? Like what's Google going to do? What's Meta or Microsoft going to do? What should

you do as a startup? What will the AIs be able to do? There's a lot of interesting outcomes.

But we're still before we've got a gray market here. Right? You don't have any legitimate path to

trade, custody, or issue any of those things until the US government has codified into some code,

hopefully into law, those rules. So having settled that, what do I think will happen long term?

I think we'll get that framework. And then I think the future is going to be millions and millions

of digital assets moving at the speed of light, millions of times an hour or a second. I think you're

going to see profound innovation in wallets and exchanges. You're going to see AI infused.

Maybe I'll have Bitcoin and an AI wallet and the AI will basically loan out my Bitcoin to 87,000

counter parties every second and then fetch it back and reconstitute it. Or maybe it won't.

And then you'll see AI is capitalized on Bitcoin. Maybe you'll see an AI in cyberspace that offers

legal advice to everybody in the world that takes Bitcoin or takes stablecoin and is capitalized

on Bitcoin that floats in a transnational way. Maybe you'll see tokens that offer utility

that is powered by AI. You could imagine a smart contract, DeFi market like a unit swap,

but there are no people. There's just an AI that's offering a trading market that floats in cyberspace,

you know, that's capitalized with Bitcoin that trades 10 million times a minute that is continually

evolving. I think there'll be all sorts of interesting things, interesting opportunities,

interesting products and services. The free market is a Cambrian explosion and mutation of life

forms and most of them will fail. 99% will fail, but you will see out of all that mutation,

you'll see extraordinarily powerful life forms that will rise. And I'm the optimist. I think that

I think that human beings will get products and services and capabilities that are

100,000 x 1 million x better cheaper faster than anything they ever had before. And I think the

world will be a better place, but ultimately I can't give you any more detail than that because the

free market, the free market is by definition free and chaotic and that's what makes it virtuous.

Friends, DeFi is having a moment. Uniswap Labs web app and wallet connect you to the excitement.

Swapping and bridging are simple, low cost and lightning fast across 13 chains,

including based arbitrum and unicane, the new layer to network designed for DeFi.

Thanks to deep liquidity on Uniswap protocols, you get minimal price impact on every trade now with

even greater efficiency through Uniswap V4. Swap, send on ramp off ramp and bridge into a bright

future, get started at uniswap.org. What are some books that people should be reading?

And what philosophers do you subscribe to?

I think anything by Rothbard, you know, Austrian economists, but especially everything by Rothbard.

I mean, history of whatever money and banking, Austria, you know, Austrian economist, you know,

history, history from an Austrian economist point of view. All the Rothbard stuff is really good.

I think, and just general history, Durant's history, read the story of civilization

every volume, beginning to end. And I think that I think you can't go wrong. And I guess probably,

if you want a third category, read biographies of every innovator, read the most in-depth biography

of JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Andrew Malin, Carnegie, you know, Edison, Newton,

Leibniz, right, Voltaire, right? Because I think that when you're just going to first-person sources,

you know, you have the history, of course, there are a lot of versions of it, then you have the,

you know, you have the struggles of the individuals and then, and then you have the economic theory.

I think all of those things position you in order to make rational decisions in the modern world.

All right. Thank you so much for this grand interview. I really appreciate it. I just,

I want to end up with one last thought, if you will, you know, when you die, I don't think you're

going to say I wish I brought my shareholders more values. So what is your goal in all this? And

what will ultimately bring you happiness, Michael? Bitcoin is an ideology that spawned a protocol

that created an asset that circulates on a network. The ideology is sovereignty, sound money,

freedom and property rights, right? Dignity of the human spirit, ownership of your life force,

economic sovereignty and immortality, right? That's the ideology of Bitcoin, right? And Satoshi gave us

that. And so, you know, if I, if I were to boil down my mission, my mission is I want to spread the

ideology of sound money, sovereignty, you know, economic freedom, economic immortality, right? What if I,

what if I told you you could live forever? That's the basis of every religion, isn't it? Well,

I can't, I'm not going to give you that promise that's, that's been done and there are, there are

other people more qualified than me to talk to you about a mortal life. But I think what Satoshi

is offering us is economic immortality. You may not live forever, but your economic energy will

live forever. And if your economic energy, if your capital lives forever, maybe that means your ideas

live forever, right? Because if I can actually, if I've, if I've got an asset that'll last 10,000

years, I can capitalize an AI and cyberspace, you know, whatever and digital sailor digital sailor

can spout, you know, things for 10,000 years. What, what is it you believe in? What is your value?

Right? And if you have a value, right? If you, if your value is, you want to preserve a park forever

with money. So you leave your money to an AI, capitalize by Bitcoin and the park, you know, gets

preserved forever. Maybe you get to see your ideas preserved forever. And you know what? If you don't

have a single idea, like maybe digital sailor is arrogant and the park will come and go,

then you have the option to convert as much wealth as you can into Bitcoin, like Satoshi did,

a million coin and burn the key. And so should you raise a million, a billion, a trillion, a

whatever? And if you burn the key, you will have made an economic contribution pro-rata to everyone

else in the Bitcoin network forever. You will have empowered everybody else. Everybody with

one Satoshi will be that much richer. And you will have made that contribution. And that strikes me

as being a much more ethically proper, ethically sound form of charity. Like you've got centralized

charity. I give the money to a charity run by someone that may spend it the way I want. But

let me tell you, if you leave your money to a charity 100 years after you're dead, they'll spend

it on something you wouldn't want them to spend it on. It'll be corrupted. That's you can figure that

out. That's true. So how about decentralized charity, which is you'll just leave your money to

the human race. And everybody that believes what I believe, I believe in Satoshi and his vision,

sovereignty, property rights, freedom, economic empowerment, economic immortality, I believe nobody

should be able to steal your money. I believe you should get to keep it. And so if I believe that,

and I burn those keys, then I have made everybody in the network that much richer and more powerful

forever. And they have the option to do the same, or maybe they'll use that power for good in a

way that they deem to be appropriate. And you're like, well, who'd you give the most power to?

I gave the most power to the person that believed the most what I believe. Right? I mean, everybody

has the choice to join the network with a dollar, $100, a million, a billion dollars, or a trillion

dollars, right? So everybody gets to join and we're all in it together from now to eternity. So,

yeah, that's my legacy. I guess that begs the question. Would you ever burn all your big

I think that I've just answered the question in the most in the most responsible way that anybody

would ever answer the question. All right, leave it at that. Okay. Michael Saylor, thank you so

much for this incredible interview. We went through the present with what you're working with

and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, US policy, the year past, going back to Air Force bases and

getting inspired by exploration and micro strategy to where you are today with strategy. And the

future, which is very exciting with the evolution of digital finance. So thank you so much for sharing

that with us. Yeah, thank you, Christine.