The Wolf Of All Streets - Short The Banks, Long Bitcoin | Twitter Spaces With Michael Saylor

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

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Good morning, afternoon, evening, everyone. Welcome. This is the third week that we're doing these Twitter spaces at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday is something that we will definitely be expanding into the future. The last few weeks have been an absolute roller coaster. I definitely suggest that you revisit last week's conversation with Caitlin Long et al. about what was going on with the banks. Now, first of all, for just a little housekeeping, please hit that arrow button up above, share it, get more people into the room.

But just tell you what to expect here today. We're going to start with myself and Michael speaking for about the first hour. And then we'll be inviting some additional guests on the stage, Jimmymy song uh potentially uh balaji and others so it's going to be uh extremely exciting and relatively long but we it will start with michael and i for about the first hour first of all michael how are you doing today man thanks for joining i'm awesome can you hear me okay you sound great okay great yeah thanks for having me of course so i we have a lot of people filing in obviously right now but i think we'll just go ahead and get started to Okay. Great. Yeah. Thanks for having me. of Credit Suisse, there's been basically some combination of bailouts or backstops for a number of banks and it seems like that contagion is only further spreading. But the real story here in my mind is what Bitcoin has done in the meantime. So first I want to start with your thoughts on whether this is a technical move, whether this is just traders trading, or if we're

truly seeing a flight to safety here and Bitcoin finally acting as the store of value that we've all expected? Yeah, good question. I think it's worthwhile just to think of this and everything that's happened in the past year. And I think you could summarize this is there has been a crisis of confidence in the crypto industry, a micro crisis of confidence in the industry that is about 1% of the world's money. And now there is a second act, which is a mainstream crisis of confidence in traditional financial assets that is all the world's money. So I think about crypto as a couple of trillion dollars, and the world's got $500 trillion of financial assets or more.

Roll the clock back 12 months, and we'll just rifle through what's happened. This is, of course, my perspective. But one, we start with a crisis of confidence in crypto derivatives. And I call it Terra Luna complex. That was a very complex derivative constructed and it crashes. Two, you have a crisis of confidence in crypto banks like BlockFi and Celsius. People find out that maybe they're riskier than they thought they were. And they meltdown. Three, there's a crisis of confidence in crypto hedge funds, like Three Arrows. First Three Arrows, eventually Alameda. And we think these geniuses that are smartest guys in the room aren't smart anymore. Four, there's a crisis of confidence in crypto trading operations, OTC desk, like Genesis.

And people that are in the business of borrowing and lending out or rehypothecating Bitcoin or other crypto assets find themselves, again, on the wrong side of these trades and they're wiped out. Five, there's a crisis of confidence in crypto exchanges. FTX is the most notable example of a meltdown. But generally, there's just been massive pressure coming from the regulators on all the crypto exchanges. And we see the pressure placed on Coinbase,

the pressure placed on Binance, et cetera. And that's created concerns, uncertainty. Six, crisis of confidence in crypto staking. You know, you saw the SEC action against Kraken and the ETH staking poll, and Gensler has said staking is a security. And so there's a question of where does that sit? Seven, there's a crisis of confidence in crypto securities. Anything based on a proof of stake token. If you've got a set of founders that are economically interested that have a that have uh that have an excessive amount of either economic interest or government or governance control that's undisclosed

that is a risky place to be there's crisis of confidence there eight this crisis of confidence in crypto settlement networks silvergate andature were the two major mainstream settlement networks. When Silvergate fails and Signature gets shut down, the question is, how do we settle on fiat rails? Big question mark. Nine, crisis of confidence in cryptocurrencies. And here I refer to stable coins like BUSD. You know, obviously we see what happened there.

It gets attacked. Custodia gets blocked. Circle, you know, has the mishap with Silicon Valley Bank. Tether has been under pressure. Ten, crisis of confidence in crypto regulators. People just, you know, people don't have confidence in the regulators. On one hand, we know they're hostile. On the other hand, there is no framework for registering a digital exchange, a digital security, a digital token, a digital commodity.

So even though there's the thought that, well, we just got to register, there's no way to register. And so there is no framework. And then there's stress and there's tension between the regulators, between the SEC, the CFTC, there's tension between the Department of Justice, there's uh between various regulators in different countries big question mark uh it's like when your parents are fighting right it's like how do the you know the kids have anxiety they got to go to counseling and then 11 there's a crisis of confidence in the crypto lawmakers the policy makers right there was there was a move to put forward legislation last year, like the Bozeman-Stabenow bill, and it just kind of imploded. And so crypto lobbyists, crypto lawmakers are all in disarray. That is the micro crisis of confidence in the crypto industry. And that's been playing out over 12 months. Now, we all know that story, but I felt it was important to lay that out

because the thing that's enveloping it right now is a mainstream crisis of confidence. And I think you could trace it, you could say the early sparks were last year. Late last year, the Bank of Japan lost the peg of 25 basis points on the 10-year treasury in Japan, and it floated up to 50 basis points, and that was like, that was a spark. And then we saw the 30-, 40-, 50 year long dated bond in the UK. They spiked up 100 basis points or more.

Big UK bond meltdown, I guess, in Q4. And the result was the chancellor of the Exchequer lasted a few days. The prime minister and the entire government fell a few days later. And so people were scratching their heads. But that was distant. That wasn't us. That was just on the island of Britain. entire government fell a few days later. And so people were scratching their heads, but that was distant. That wasn't us. That was just on the island of Britain. And so the question is, why would an entire government topple the prime minister, the government and the head of the treasury all topple so quickly? And people couldn't quite get their hands around it. the answer is when you jack

the interest rates up 150 basis points the bond portfolios with a duration if you have a bond portfolio a duration of 20 which is like a 30-year bond a one a 100 basis point move causes the bond to be trading down 20 and so if you have a long duration bond portfolio, 10 to 20, then you're talking about crushing 10 to 20% or more of these bond assets. And that rendered every bank and all the pension funds insolvent, you know, theoretically on paper. And so that just couldn't stand and that, you know, because they realize they're going to melt down the entire British economy. So we saw that happen last year. That was the warning shot. if you can just blame the one, the executive team or scapegoat or say it's a one off, it's, you know, it's because of incompetence of management or they were in the wrong business, then you can look the other way. And there's no, you know, there's no mass scare. But of course,

after Silvergate failed, then Silicon Valley Bank, you know, started to fail and that created a bigger crisis. And that was sensitized, that sensitized. And I think, I think it radicalized, if not engaged all of the Silicon Valley tech VC community. And we saw them get very loud on Twitter. That actually escalated this thing. And then, And then the shutdown of Silvergate, it accelerated the loss of confidence in the regulators. And it crisis of confidence is midsize banks, right? So the contagion spreads to midsize banks like FRC and the like because they're all holding the same portfolios. And, of course, at that point, people start asking the question, why are these banks in trouble? And so we actually see a crisis of confidence in bank accounting, because the reason they're in trouble is because they're not marking to market their assets. If

they're marking their assets to market, they all would have had to take mega, every time the Fed raises interest rates 25 basis points, you're going to have a $50 billion write-off by the banks. And by the time you raise interest rates 300 or 400 basis points, you would have a $10 trillion, multi-trillion dollar write-off of banks. But because they've got the ability to hold these assets to maturity, they're not writing them out. So now we think, well, we don't really trust the banks, but we also don't trust the accounting.

And then Credit Suisse catches fire. And then we think, well, we don't really trust the banks, but we also don't trust the accounting. And then Credit Suisse catches fire. And then we think, well, that's a small thing. And then the Swiss National Bank is going to bail them out for $50 billion. OK, we would think that a $50 billion bailout from the National Bank of Switzerland puts that thing to rest. But it doesn't, which makes you think, oh, more than $50 billion got withdrawn from that bank. Now they have to merge it with UBS. Now UBS is afraid to buy it. They want government guarantees. Now the Swiss National Bank has to put up $100 billion in Swiss francs. Oops. If this is that big in Switzerland, if you've got a problem

of $100 billion in Switzerland, you've got to multiply that by at least 10, right? So now it starts to look like a trillion-dollar problem. Then you get expressions of confidence from the central bankers. So the six challenges, the Fed, the EU, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Swiss National Bank all agree to swap lines. But what does that mean? Right? What that means is that, in essence, the Federal Reserve is going to be sending hundreds of billions and likely trillions of dollars to the other central banks in currency, swapping it for either posted treasury collateral or maybe even for currencies. And that's an opaque thing. So now you start to see this thing becoming systemic. And, of course, that spreads to a crisis of confidence in mortgage-backed

securities and agency mortgage bonds. I mean, that's the headline this morning, $8 trillion of them, right? I mean, obviously, if they're yielding 1.8% interest for the next year and the risk-free rate is 450 basis points, then you would have to be crazy to want to own them. So now eight and the mainstream crisis of confidence hit parade is we have a crisis of confidence in sovereign debt. In essence, it's a credit bubble. We've got $100 trillion of debt out there and I don't know what it is, $30, $40, $50 trillion of US sovereign debt

and it's all it's all held to maturity not mark to market when you mark it all to market it's going to be a 10 trillion dollar disappearance so so this this is a conundrum right because the central banks they decide there's a too much inflation so they got to take the interest rates up and the way that when they take the interest rates up you know they got to take the interest rates up. And the way that when they take the interest rates up, you know, if they could take the interest rates up without actually marking down the portfolio of bonds, it's like having your cake and eating it too. But if you, but, but the way you're contracting the money from the system is you're taking a hundred trillion dollars worth of bonds and marking them down to $85 trillion. And there's

$15 trillion taken out of the system. But if we pretend it wasn't taken out of the system, then all the banks are solvent. But as soon as they market to market, they're not solvent. So the accounting of hold these to maturity says, I don't have to market to market. But that doesn't work if there's a run on the bank and people just start to withdraw their deposits. So what you have, in essence, in rapid succession is a crisis of confidence in mortgage debt and sovereign debt and then just in the bond market in general. How can you have confidence in any fixed income asset? And as I pointed out, that leads to a crisis of confidence in the bank accounting and that leads to a crisis of confidence in the bank accounting, and that leads to a crisis of confidence in central bank policy. Like maybe, maybe if you, the most important chart, Scott, I think is the five-year chart of the, of the one month or three month T-bill rate.

And if you look at that chart, then of course you realize that it kind of was 180 basis points, you know, six years ago. They took it up to 250 basis points, broke things. Then they brought it back to 100 basis points in January of 2020. And then they crashed to zero basis points or something like that in March of 2020. And then we were at zero on the floor for about 18 months. And then we went into a steep climb from zero to 475 or 500 basis points or the like over the next 12 months. And of course, what you're doing when you take it to zero is you're inflating the credit bubble to infinity. And then when you're pulling back on the stick of the airplane

and you're taking it from zero to 500 basis points, you're ripping the wings off the airplane, which is the entire economy. So you can't fly a $500 trillion economy like some Red Bull sports aircraft. You're either going to black out, you're going to crash and burn, or you're going to rip the wings off of the plane and blackout, and then you'll crash and burn. So there's a, there's a crisis of confidence there. But, you know, you just add 12, 13, or 14 to this, there's political party dysfunction between the Republicans and the Democrats, right? Just dysfunctional, you know, all the, you know, all of the, I'm not going to go into what it is, you know what it is. It's, you know, they don't get along. And then there's regulatory dysfunction. You have conflict between, you know, the judge, the bankruptcy judge in the

Voyager case, you know, and the SEC and the Justice Department and, you know, the CFTC. And there's just a lot of dysfunction there. And then there's a crisis of confidence in political leadership. So there you go. A mainstream crisis of confidence in a 500 plus trillion dollar economy, a micro crisis of confidence in the crypto economy. A year ago, all these things were kind of under the surface and they've all kind of come to the surface in the last 12 months and everyone's been brutal. What's happened in the last two weeks? Massive Bitcoin rally. Why? Well, you know, I think that if you just put all that into your synthesizer and you say, what do I trust? What am I willing to invest my money in?

Where's my safe haven with all this anxiety? And the safe haven is simple. It's Bitcoin, the asset, Bitcoin, the network, right? Those two things are your safe haven. Bitcoin, the asset, is the safest currency, the safest investment asset I can find because it lacks counterparty risk. And because all of the 11 meltdowns I mentioned in the crypto market, all 11 of those catastrophes have not stopped Bitcoin from functioning. It has survived them all. And so I sense in the crypto community, Scott, a grudging respect growing over the past 12 months for Bitcoin. If you roll the clock back 12 months ago, there are a lot of people that just, you know, the trolls said, oh, it's boomer coin. You know, I'm not going to say who, but many people said it will be irrelevant in five years.

You know, it's the last thing. It's aged tech. And I think that what they realized is that, you know, when there's infinite money and the regulators are not active and the politicians aren't noticing you, then you can have a lot of fragile structures. We had a lot of fragile, overly complicated Rube Goldberg devices in the crypto industry, Terra Luna being the most famous example, that they kind of flew. And then as soon as there's pressure on them, you just realize they're unstable. They're too complicated. Maybe they're good ideas, but they're good ideas, but they're implemented in an unstable fashion or irresponsible fashion or non-compliant fashion. And when scrutiny comes to them, they're going to collapse. And all of the bankrupt entities, right? BlockFi was a good idea, but it was unstable. Celsius, unstable, right? All these things unstable. They all collapsed. But, you know, in their defense, you know, would be all fractional reserve banks, right? billion in deposits that you have to deliver on one day notice back to the depositor or one hour

notice. And if you're turning around and lending it out for 30 years and a fixed mortgage rate security, that was a bit fragile. And of course, if you went and you bought bonds with it that had a 10 or 20 year duration, that was also unstable. So what we're seeing is a lot of overly complicated schemes to generate yield collapse under this kind of stress. So I think people realize maybe Bitcoin is not such a bad idea, like no yield and no counterparty risk. And, you know, Satoshi is not around to embarrass us, right? I mean, there is a point to this, which is if there's an attack, if there's a tax surface, whatever it is, why is Bitcoin rallying? The answer is every other idea for investment seems like a pretty bad idea right now, Scott. And everybody that understands Bitcoin really well, that also had their money in altcoins or stablecoins or other investment ideas or they're there. You know, if you're a crypto VC or you're a stable coin holder or you're a whatever, you're thinking, well, that is more

risky than I thought it was. And it didn't work out as well as I thought it would. And so what do I know that I can that I can run to in times of stress it's it's bitcoin if if the stable coins when busd is not available to me and when silver gate and and signature are not available to me and I need to settle on the weekend right I'm driven from those stable coins into tether but then if I start to get worried about tether, what am I going to do? I'm going to go back to old school. And old school was Bitcoin was the unit of account in the crypto economy. Tether and stable coins made the US dollar the unit of account in the crypto economy.

But I think we see people reverting back to Bitcoin as unit of account. Bitcoin is the reserve asset of the crypto ecosystem. Bitcoin is the safe haven asset. And this is being pounded into people's heads. So some of the money is the crypto assets that are looking for the safe haven. And as you get anxiety about everywhere else, you know, you kind of run to Bitcoin because, you know, Bitcoin is not going to screw you. Bitcoin doesn't have a management team to take advantage of you. And it doesn't have

it doesn't matter who you are. Don't trust me. You shouldn't trust any politician or any business person anywhere in the world. You should trust a protocol. The one thing I'm sure of, reasonably sure of, is that the number nine will be interpreted to mean nine by billions of people in a year. And the word love and the word hate will be interpreted to be love and hate by a billion English speakers in a year. And one BTC equals one BTC and I can run my note. So the protocols are actually, people got bored with Bitcoin and in the crypto world and they started thinking it's boring. I missed the boat and they stopped appreciating the beauty and the simplicity of

a protocol. And now I think they're rediscovering it. And I think I think you see that with the crypto entrepreneurs. I think you see that with Cointelegraph. I think you see that with Coindesk. I think you see that on the cover of Bloomberg Crypto. I think you see that in the mainstream media. There's a grudging respect and an acknowledgement that maybe Bitcoin is not such a bad idea. Maybe Bitcoin is not boomer coin. Maybe Bitcoin is a good idea. And so that's part of it. I think the other part of it is Bitcoin the network. these stable coin networks, if I can't settle with the crypto exchanges, if I can't settle with Silvergate and Signature, and if I get my banking assets cut off, then the one settlement network that I can trust is the Bitcoin settlement network. So the value of Bitcoin as a settlement network has been undervalued. People undervalue the idea that I can move a billion dollars on Saturday from point A to point B without asking permission. And maybe you see how I just basically

said that everybody that needs to give you permission seems to be hostile in a world where every single regulator and every bank, everything seems hostile. It's a hostile, dangerous world. You start thinking that maybe the ability to use the Bitcoin network has been undervalued. So I think that that's rising to prominence. I think the third thing that's driving enthusiasm is Bitcoin applications. We saw Warden Oltz and Taproot and the like. It's like, well, maybe I can build stuff on it. Maybe Bitcoin is a network that I can do DeFi on. I can do NFT on. I can do settlements on. I can build applications on. If I don't trust everything else, maybe I return back to this idea that Bitcoin has an application future. And then I think the fourth observation is the Lightning Network is really exploding all around us. I think there's an explosion in entrepreneurs. There's so many cool applications that are going on the Lightning Network.

MicroStrategy is hosting a Lightning for Corporations conference. There's so many cool applications that are going on the Lightning Network. MicroStrategy's hosting a Lightning for Corporations conference. It'll be the first one in the history of the world. We're going to have thousands and thousands of global 5,000 companies and IT people, and they're looking at how do I build Lightning into my corporate apps. And I think that if you look at the subtext here is, if everybody's afraid of everything else, but I've shown you a way to move money over IP in a open permissionless fashion that's ethically sound, that's economically sound, and that's technically sound, then again, I've invented money over IP. TCP IP changed the world. Voice over IP changed the world.

Money over IP will change the world. There's been this struggle about what is money over IP. Well, it's got to be an open permissionless protocol. You can't own it. If Linus Torvalds had owned a 20% royalty on Linux, it wouldn't be Linux. Steven Jobs declared war on Flash, and he elevated HTML, HTML5, and he elevated other open protocols because he understood that you can't assert proprietary ownership on this stuff. In fact, I'm old enough to remember when DECNET and Token Ring were the networking protocols,

and they were owned by Digital and IBM, and they went to zero. And TCPIP, which was thought to be this technically complicated protocol that was too hard to use and not business- friendly and the like, it destroyed everybody because it was open information. It was information on IP. And eventually voice over IP did the same thing. Initially, it was college girls talking to their boyfriends on Skype. And then it turned the world upside down.

And I think money over IP is the same thing. So I think that would be my framing of everything going on right now. Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come. I don't think, by the way, Scott, I don't think that the Bitcoin rally is due to mainstream adoption of Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin rally is due to crypto adoption of Bitcoin. You know, this is a catalytic event, Scott, that has rallied the entire crypto community behind Bitcoin because we were at war with each other a year ago. I mean, Sam Bankman, Freed, and all of the other crypto ideas, of which there were probably 25 of them, they were frenemies,

and they could not agree. And I think that when FTX melted down, I think it was a come- Jesus moment for crypto people because they realized that we really have to put our differences aside and agree on one thing, which is Bitcoin is good. Right. And if you want to boil this down, like my view is Bitcoin is open permissionless digital commodity. Nobody controls it. Everybody has to pay their way into it. If I want to have Bitcoin, I put $4.2 billion of real cash into Bitcoin. And if I say the wrong thing, the maximalists shred me tomorrow.

And I know that I don't have any control whatsoever over the protocol, even though I paid $4 billion to buy into it, because it's everybody's property. And so Bitcoin is this common thing we can all agree on, and nobody owns. Everything else, they're all good ideas, Scott. Like digital tokens, you know, Tom Brady token, Katy Perry token, NFTs, they're good ideas. 24-7, 365 trading is a good idea. Being able to launch 100,000 securities a million times cheaper than the 20th century way, it's a good idea.

DeFi, a good idea. They're all good ideas, but they all have risk and complication to them. And for the most part, it's like companies with equities and you need to build a company, no matter how good an idea it is. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you're like Bitcoin miner. You're a Bitcoin miner, but you know, is it a good idea? Maybe it is until the regulators shut it down in China. It's like they all have risk. And so I think when the crypto community says, hey, we have a lot of good ideas, but there is one great, insanely great idea that we all have

to support. And that one insanely great idea is Bitcoin. And if we make Bitcoin the reserve asset of the crypto ecosystem, and if we focus on what made the Bitcoin network anti-fragile, then at least we found our moral bearings, our economic bearings, and we found our technical bearings. And you can build a world based upon that foundation. But if you run away from that foundation, you're building on a bed of sand and everything is fragile and it all crumbles under your feet. Totally agree. And so that's why Bitcoin is rallying right now. And we're still early days with regard to the mainstream community getting it.

I'll make one more point and I'll shut up. My last point is we're still 0.1%, 0.2% of the mainstream finance world. And so everything going on in the crypto ecosystem and the Bitcoin world is really just a sideshow. What happens in this mainstream opera, the regulators, the politicians, they're going to fight and they're going to take lots of action to stabilize that. That's above my pay grade. We're not going to fix that. There's a lot of complicated stuff that's going to go on. What you can expect is this is just taking us from 0.1% to 0.2% to 0.4% to eventually 1%. And when Bitcoin is trading at 10x where it is right now, we're going to be like, you know, like a 1%, you know, and the main show is still going to be

conventional banking. And so that's why I would say, if you've got some energy in life, you know, why do I have laser eyes? The laser eyes is, is save what you can save, fix what you can do, what you can do. We can make Bitcoin successful and we can build an ethical, sound, rational set of applications and, and a framework around it, if we start from Bitcoin, trying to go fix the rest of the world is a fool's errand. We're not going to fix everything else. There's 100 other things that we could dwell on, but they're above our pay grade. And you want to fix that?

You need $25 trillion to make a dent at that thing. And so that's not going to happen for the individual or anybody on this space. Right. And I don't believe that it has to. I think that you're 100% accurate in your assessment that this is largely crypto native moving into Bitcoin. And you can see that, obviously, just by looking at a Bitcoin dominance chart, which is something that we've seen in previous cycles as well. I just want to circle back a bit to the banking. Obviously, you know, the fiduciary responsibility, MicroStrategy owns billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. You personally own Bitcoin. We've seen Elizabeth Warren. She was effectively dancing on the grave of Silvergate,

causing, you could argue, this sort of screaming fire in a movie theater situation that led to the other collapses. That really did tip everyone off to this idea of Operation Chokepoint. I don't necessarily have an opinion whether that is or is not happening. But how much concern do you have, even though Bitcoin is a 24-7 settlement layer, that at some point it will be very difficult to exit that and go back to fiat when necessary? Because I think everyone would agree that you still need on and off ramps. So how much of a concern is that? Well, I think through all of this chaos and carnage, Bitcoin has been rising to prominence and is more institutionalized now than it was a year ago or two years ago. I think there's, if you read all mainstream literature, there is universal agreement in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, from every regulator, every politician everywhere in the world. There

is universal agreement. Bitcoin is an asset that is that is going to continue, that has a meaningful place in the world. Like I think that I think we have crossed the event horizon. So ironically, right, the shutdown of these of these banks, it's what they're doing is they are impairing the dollar settlement networks of the crypto exchanges. Right. So if Genesis right so if if genesis wanted to trade otc with a crypto exchange on the weekend right then they either have to use stable coin right how do you do it right there's three layers four layers i could it used to be i trade with bitcoin and so then then tether comes along. So I trade with offshore stable coin and then Circle and Paxos come along and I trade with quasi semi regulated stable coin and then Signature and Silvergate come along and I trade with fiat stable dollars, right? So these are all just settlement networks for high speed crypto traders. So what happens if I shut them, if I shut down the fiat network? Well, then I roll to stable coin circle. What happens if I shut that down? I roll to tether. What happens when people lose

confidence in that? I roll to Bitcoin. So Scott, ultimately, this is just driving people to Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin is the settlement layer we can all trust, then, and I had a million dollars in stable coin. And I thought that whoever operated the stable coin could simply freeze my money and steal it from me. Wouldn't I sell stable coin and buy Bitcoin? Absolutely. If I had a million dollars in Celsius or a million dollars in a neo crypto bank and I lost confidence, wouldn't I, you know, what you do is you have a stack, a tower. I basically pull it out of the crypto bank and put it into stable coin. Then I move it to the most stable coin. Then I move it. If I can exit to a bank, I do. But people that are in the crypto ecosystem didn't get into the ecosystem because

they believed that they could get rich or stay rich by buying dollars or pesos or yen or boulevard right so so ultimately yeah it's it's vexing it's like it's it's just another irritant and it's a nuisance. But this is a marketing event that's reminding everybody why they like Bitcoin. You know how – this is ironic. It's counterintuitive. But you know what bankrupts the gun companies? When the politician says we're going to make guns legal. You follow me?

Absolutely. Like apparently every time the politicians say we're going to outlaw guns, when someone reads that you're not going to be able to buy guns in such and such state, sales go up by a factor of 10. And so in this particular case, the harder they attack the network, the more anti-fragile, the more it responds. So I don't think it made Bitcoin weaker. I think it made it stronger, right? Because there's a whole world of people in the crypto ecosystem. They don't have a choice. Right. Like if you're in Lebanon or you're in Venezuela or you're in Argentina right now and, you know, you lose confidence in a certain crypto exchange, you move to a stable coin.

If you lose confidence in the stable coin, you just find the most stable, most reliable crypto asset. Right. What else do you do right anecdotally i mean last weekend i went on vacation we saw the uh de-pegging of usdc and i very quickly largely moved my usdc into bitcoin and i'm not in venezuela i'm not in Argentina, and I'm not in Lebanon. Yeah, there's also this kind of dynamic. Like if Bitcoin is boomer coin and nobody believes in it, then you're wanting to actually invest in something with a higher alpha. And so you're going into other crypto assets or you're holding your money in a bank, you know, for opportunity. Right. Or, you know, or the other thing is, right,

I'm going to take my money, I'm going to put it into overnight T-bills that yield 450 basis points or 480 basis points. So, so the Fed sucked a lot of money out of everything, right? They sucked money out of every asset. What asset do you really want to hold if you can get 480 basis points risk-free overnight money, right? So that happened. But when they cut off that on-ramp, off-ramp, and you're staring at this, you're thinking everything just looks more risky. What we say over and over again in Bitcoin is, you know if your time horizon is 10 years it's not risky at all it's the least risky thing in the world the frustration is just is getting people to see that that if you're willing to stomach some volatility it's low low risk so i think what

happened is a rotation where people all you know all of a sudden realize maybe Bitcoin has actually got a much brighter future than we thought. And maybe it's more valuable than we understood. And maybe the thing that we thought was safe isn't safe no more. And all of the, I had confidence in, I don't have confidence anymore. I just, I just gave you right. A list of, in essence, 11 crisis of confidences in the crypto world and another 14 mainstream. So you kind of got 25 areas of the world where people on the margin are less confident today than they were a year ago. And if you go to my Twitter, you'll find I ran a poll and I asked people after the Silicon Valley

bank bailout, are you more confident in, in the banking system today than you were before this this all started like a week ago. And in one week, people were 85% less confident. So as that confidence breaks down, people are going to want to run to safety. And honestly, Scott, if you ask me, so what's safe? I mean, the truth is I can't in good conscience make a single recommendation to you other than I think Bitcoin the asset and Bitcoin the protocol are both safe. But I'm not telling you that launching an application company on Bitcoin or launching a lightning application on Bitcoin is safe. You could screw it up and blow it up and not make money. All I'm saying to you is I feel pretty confident in TCP IP. I feel confident in voiceover IP. I feel confident in the English language. I feel confident in base 10 math. And I feel confident in the Bitcoin protocol as the

monetary protocol that's emerging because, I mean, we spent 10,000 hours looking for everything else and the world is beat on everything else and there's infinite money chasing after anything else and nobody can find anything better. So all I got for you is Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And that's what I would say to everybody. I've been saying it.

But a year ago, you know, you didn't have these 25 meltdowns. Today, I think the difference is a lot of people have had their feathers singed or, you know, are taking a beating by taking more risk. And now let's take Balaji. I mean, there are people that are that are actually they've had their come to Jesus moment. And when your bank seizes all your money and freezes it, that's a pretty big come to Jesus moment. So I think a lot of people are realizing this today and they didn't a year ago. I agree. And we're actually trying to add Balaji to the conversation. Just so everyone knows, we're having a major issue with Twitter spaces and unable to add or remove people at the moment. Try to get that sorted out.

I want to go back to one another point. Scott, I think it's a request. I think if they request, we can add them. So if Balaji requests, we can add him. That's not a problem. Okay, so we'll work on that in a bit. Thanks, Rand. Michael, I want to circle back to the idea sort of of this great decoupling that we have here.

A lot of people, I think, have been married to the idea that Bitcoin trades just like any other risk on asset because that happened for a temporary period of time. There was a point, you know, last year where the correlation had reached 0.8. But now it's sub 0.2 and has only dropped for almost nine or 10 months. Do you think that we're done with that narrative that we can start actually, I think that we were all done with that narrative long before. And when you zoom out to 10 years, you know that that's not a correlated asset. But do you think that we have enough here now for people to see the light and realize that this is not a correlated asset and that you don't have to view it in the same lens as a stock? Or is that how Wall Street is going to continue to approach this because it's familiar? I think this is a catalytic crisis which has has cemented the great decoupling.

Yeah, I think this crisis did it. I think you're watching it over the past two weeks. And you need a crisis to change people's deeply held beliefs. And I think the crypto meltdown, it kind of put everybody in the crypto industry on edge where they had to say, well, what do I believe? And I think that if I if I polled 100 people in the crypto industry today, do you think that Bitcoin is good for crypto and is and is a base foundation for crypto? They say yes. And I think that in the mainstream media, I think that people were ignoring Bitcoin as a bank. You know what I said? I've been saying if you go to hope.com and you read it, it says Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace.

Right. I mean, it and we've been saying that for two and a half years. Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace run by incorruptible software offering a global, affordable, simple, and secure savings account to billions of people that don't have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund. That was on the site two and a half years ago. Everybody ignored it. They said Bitcoin is a speculative asset. And what's happened here is people said, oh my God, banks are hedge funds. And they said, wait a minute, banks are hedge funds. My deposits are given away to a bank to gamble with. I want a different bank. Bitcoin is a bank. It's not a hedge fund.

And the difference today is, again, if you go to my Twitter, you see I posted a video of Chamath on the All In podcast. And Chamath is basically saying, man, what I've realized is we really need a bank that will just store our money and not lend it out, right? I mean, but we're going to have to do that in software. We need a different approach. What would that approach be? And of course, the obvious approach was written in 2008 by Satoshi in the white paper. It's just that the entire world is having a hard time embracing the idea of Bitcoin as a bank and the value of a non-sovereign monetary asset, which is orthogonal to the currencies of the world and is absolutely scarce. And so I think, Scott, we rotate from

the narrative of crypto is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is speculation to the narrative of what Bitcoin is actually a risk-off asset and it's a bank in cyberspace run by incorruptible software and it represents an alternative to the existing 20th century fractional banking system and and uh scott yeah ironically you know what causes the mainstream media to change the narrative it's like if the price runs up ten thousand dollars you have to have an explanation for why. And so the price movement causes people to say, well, I can't explain it the way I explained it before because if everybody's in fear and the price is going up, there must be a different explanation.

So I think what's happened here is the mainstream has embraced the idea that maybe they misunderstood Bitcoin, and maybe it isn't just a batshit crazy speculative asset, but maybe it is actually a different approach to banking and a different approach to currency. And in a world where everybody in the world is simultaneously losing confidence in the banks and in their currencies. Right. If you're not if you're not quick, you think, well, it's just the regional banks that

are melting down. And if you're quicker, you think, well, all the bank, the entire banking model is broken. And then if you and then what follows next is, wow, this is not a $25 billion bailout. It went from $25 billion to a trillion in a hurry, but now we're staring at numbers that look like $10 trillion. And so at this point, a rational macro person, and I'm not saying they're all going to get it this fast, but a rational person says the entire banking model is broken and then all the entire fiat currency system is uh is uh broken and there's going to be a massive wave of money printing and that means i need to have my wealth i need to have my wealth uh denominated in an asset which is not a currency derivative of the dollar or the peso the the boulevard, the euro. I need, I need a non-currency derivative and I need to put my non-currency derivative in a bank

without counterparty risk, which means maybe self-custody or it just means I don't have to trust you, right? Somebody. And so I think it's big, big catalytic change, Scott. And we're still early. Like, I'm not sure everybody else would say what I just said, but the writing is on the wall here. And I think that Bitcoin is through the worst of the crisis. And at this point, we're poised for the next bull run. And it should be a much more pleasant bull run because everybody, Scott, there is a special place in hell in my mind for people that loan out their Bitcoin and then borrow the Bitcoin and then sell the Bitcoin short so they can speculate and then lose the Bitcoin.

Right. And I'm not going to say who might have done that. But everybody that thought it was a bright idea to rehypothecate Bitcoin and sell it short or naked or lose it. They've all been bankrupted in the past 12 months. And so given the fact that all of the players that were in the business of shorting Bitcoin or rehypothecating it got wiped out. And if you're holding Bitcoin after it got beat down five successive times from 6,000 to 16,000, I think you qualify as a true believer, right? And at 16,000, you know, all of us were ready to write it to fucking zero, right? And so I think that this is a coming of age catalytic event for Bitcoin. I think we've gotten through the crisis and now this has steeled the resolve of the maximalist. And I just I'll just give you one more very important framework here, which is there's five kinds of Bitcoin investors.

There's the there's the deniers and they think it's just a tulip Ponzi scheme, tulip bulb, whatever, nothing. And they've been silenced because they've been made to look foolish. And then the second set of investors are the skeptics. They think it's too good to be true, the government will ban it. And a lot of people are in that camp. But the government hasn't banned it. The government's embraced it, guys. Like that's pretty obvious that the chair of the SEC, let me lay this out. Jerome Powell, Christina Lagarde, Gary Gensler, Rostam Benham, and Janet Yellen have all endorsed Bitcoin explicitly as a legitimate asset. So the skeptics are wrong. The deniers are fools. And now you're on to the, you've just got the traders, the technocrats and the maximalists. The traders think it's just a, it's either an uncorrelated asset or a correlated asset,

and they've been dominating it. and uh there's a lot more traders there's always going to be traders and uh they'll do whatever they're going to do the technocrats think it's a digital monetary network and it's it's money over ip and the technocrats are the same people that would hold apple stock or google stock for decades. And, you know, they're hardcore. And there's an avalanche of them coming. As soon as they start to see that Bitcoin is another approach to banking, oh my, it's the digital transformation of banking. Well, and then the maximalist, and here I have a much less controversial view of maximalists. If you believe that Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment, if you think it's an ethical good thing for 8 billion people, you're a maximalist. It's just a monetary protocol that gives property rights to 8 billion people that cannot be seized.

That's my definition of maximalist. And once you believe it's an instrument of economic empowerment, then, of course, you're going to do everything you can to spread it to 8 billion people and contribute to it because it's ethically superior to just a good technical idea. I mean, I made a lot of money investing in Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, et cetera. But my point is I didn't think they were going to free 8 billion people from slavery. Right. I didn't think they're going to change the world. I just thought they made the world somewhat better. Right. And ultimately, their companies and companies are corruptible because they have management team and they're run by people. Bitcoin's a protocol. And so so a protocol is what allows you to be a commodity, not a security. And I think what's happening here is the deniers are gone,

right? There's a nail in their coffin. If you're a denier like a Peter Schiff, right, you have no credibility left. The skeptics have stopped barking loudly that Bitcoin's too good to be true and the government will ban it. The skeptics are also, they're out of the mainstream. There's no credibility for them. The traders were trading it as a risk asset and they were shorting it in order to hedge their Nasdaq portfolio. But the traders just got destroyed, Scott. The traders that were short Bitcoin it in order to hedge their Nasdaq portfolio. But the traders just got destroyed, Scott. The traders that were short Bitcoin got wrecked. And the traders, the crypto traders are all out of business.

They're all bankrupt. And the mainstream traders are looking at this thing saying, I'm going to short this at my own risk. And now you've just got technocrats and then you've got maximalists. And we're 1 percent of the journey and i think that uh yeah i think that the contribution of people like balaji is is to point out to the mainstream world balaji is going to get the attention of all the technocrats and he's going to get the attention of a lot of other people that that everybody's got to wake up and pay attention to this. Bitcoin is legit.

This is real. And this is an instrument to change the world for the better. And so I applaud that. And I think we should all be trumpeting that message. Could not agree more. I know you have to go in a few minutes and I see Saifuddin has joined, which is incredible. And we'll have some more people joining. But Mike, I just want to ask you finally, and then I would like to go to him and get his opinion.

We all agree that this move has been somewhat native to crypto. We discussed that before. How is this going to naturally jump the chasm with more bank failures, more contagion? Or is there something that you believe that the maximalists and the crypto community, Bitcoin community in general, can do to help facilitate bringing the mainstream in now that we have their attention? Look, I say Bitcoin is hope for Argentina. Bitcoin is hope for Nigeria. Bitcoin is hope for fill in the blank. If you're a family in Argentina or if you're a company in Argentina, I can help you by giving you Bitcoin and helping you figure out how to onboard and custody. I can't solve the problems of Argentina.

It's above my pay grade. So and I would say the same is true with every nation state and every bank. I you know, I think the constructive thing right now is for everybody in the crypto community to come together, get behind Bitcoin, and then figure out how you enable onboarding, enable adoption, enable education, you know, et cetera. Take every good idea that you had in the past 10 years, build it on Bitcoin. And, you know, I would say there's a hundred things in the world, you know, that, that I'm, you know, I don't care for, right. You know, I'm, I'm not in favor of big government and I just gave you 25 problems in the world. But I'm not here to solve the problems of the world. I think Satoshi taught us humility

and laser eyes imply humility. And the humility is change what you can change, do what you can do. And so there's only one thing that I think I can do. and I think we should focus on, which is how do we accelerate the adoption of Bitcoin? Because you're going to see all the politicians, all the regulators react to all these crises and they're all going to do their job and we're going to get bounced around. And every one of them is going to be a marketing event for bitcoin they're all going to catalyze bitcoin hyperinflation in argentina catalyzes bitcoin right there's it's going to be two steps forward one step backwards right lots of lots and lots of of crises and sound and fury but at the end of the day you got to keep your wits about you and you got to keep your eye on the prize which is eight billion people on the planet with bitcoin and how are you going to get that to them and then

everything else everything else is like i'm in favor of of every bitcoin related business but you know you've got compliance issues you've got compliance issues. You've got energy issues. A Bitcoin miner struggles against an energy thing here. A Bitcoin bank struggles against that there. Those are that's the struggle. The struggle is real. And that's I unit of account. That's my standard. That is my ideology. That is my protocol. And I'm going to support that no matter what. And then you've got your business. You get up every day and you go to work to make money, hopefully to make money in fiat to buy Bitcoin. And, and when you're, you know, I'm not on this call to tell you microstrategy software is the best and you should all go buy microstrategy software and sell Microsoft software now, even though I love microstrategy software.

But the point is, that's a business, right? I mean, I'm not going to tell you where to eat. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life. And you might screw it up, right? I mean, that being the case, you just got to understand that 8 billion people and 100 million companies are going about their business in different nation states under different rules. And that's an ugly, difficult, challenging situation. And I wish you all the best of luck, right. But I want but I think that we can all agree Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment. And if we just keep coming back to that, then we'll at least be half right in everything we do.

Absolutely agree. If you're there, I would love your answer as well. Michael, I want to be respectful of your time, obviously. Welcome to stick around and continue. Yeah, I want to hear everybody else talk anyway. I apologize for hogging the floor. No, that was the plan. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks. Cool.

Thanks, guys, for having me on. Yeah, I enjoyed listening to Michael. Great to hear you as always, Michael. And I agree. me on um yeah it's enjoyed listening to michael great to hear you as always uh michael and i uh i agree i think it's um i think what we see with uh people like balaji and people like shamath and a lot of the silicon valley people who have been around uh who have you know seemingly been around bitcoin for a while and you would expect them to get bitcoin i'm gonna go ahead and say that balaji really only got bitcoin last week this is is it. It took Silicon Valley Bank to happen for Balaji to finally get Bitcoin.

And if you actually look at what Balaji had been doing before with Bitcoin, I would say all of the shitcoining and all of the crypto kitties and all of the many ventures that he'd gone through, all the shitcoins launched on Coinures that he'd gone through, all the shit coins launched on Coinbase that he'd promoted and helped, all of the pre-mines, all of those things. I would suggest basically he had not gotten Bitcoin. He thought of Bitcoin as just some cool software.

And I think it takes a crisis to sharpen and focus the mind. And when all of this world of startups, all of these Silicon Valley amazing startups that had a lot of money and a lot of funding and were doing well, and then suddenly, yep, sorry, you banked with a fractional reserve banking. And that means there's a chance

that this all goes poof someday. And indeed it did go poof. And that really, I think, drove the point home that, oh, wow, okay, there is no safe haven, there is no money. The phrase money in the bank may as well mean lottery ticket, because you could just wake up one day and your bank is gone. I think this is really, really powerful advertisement for Bitcoin's value prop. And it's something that up until a few weeks ago, you know, basically it's one of those things that you had to be a weird fundamentalist maxi to care about this. Like, why are all these maxis out there trying to tell people in the U.S. that they need Bitcoin? They don't.

All right. Maybe people in Lebanon and Argentina need Bitcoin because their banks don't work. But here in the U.S., you know, we've got all these amazing banks. Well, that seems now people understand why they're not so amazing. In fact, the only reason that they've lasted so long, that they've gotten the facade of being reliable, is the fact that the US has the global reserve currency, which means the reason that Silicon Valley Bank was propped up up until last week and from last week, the reason it has existed and the reason it existed after the crisis is because the U.S. basically exports the inflation

needed to keep up these bonzies that are the U.S. banking system. It exports it to the rest of the world. All the world holds dollars and treasuriesuries and all that gets devalued every time these banks are involved with low interest rates so um i think i'm i'm very delighted to see this um begin to get through to people like yeah this is different from crypto kitties and i think um i i i disagree with bellagio on the idea that we're going to get a million dollars per Bitcoin within three months. I think this is what makes me think that he indeed did only get Bitcoin last week. Because when you first get Bitcoin or when you first understand how collection reserve banking works, ask anybody who's gone through this come to Jesus moment. You are sure that everything is going to fall apart next week. You know, this is what happened to me in 2008, 2009.

It's what happens to everybody I know who's gotten into Austrian economics and has thought about the banking system from a way that is different from what is taught at university. Like once you figure out how it works, you're like, well, this is going to obviously fall apart next week. And then next week comes along and it's still there and then you know a few months or years later you ask yourself well you know it's been around for 50 years maybe it can be around for another year maybe two maybe three and then you realize okay maybe it's not going to collapse so i think bellagio is going to probably um

down a little bit and realize, yeah, this is going to, this is not going to a million in a month. Hey, Sam, can I add, I agree with you. I agree with you. I think that the current world order and the existing system will continue and it's not in anybody's interest for it to collapse. And so we agree on that. I think that Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin's growth is going to progress over the next decade, two decades, three decades. And it's probably better for the world if it takes 30 years before the entire world's on a Bitcoin standard than 30 months or 30 days but i do think uh balaji's his his uh bet is genius marketing because he has managed to get massive massive attention in the mainstream to this so if the goal was to bring

attention to it it's good marketing if uh if i don't think it's in the best interest of bitcoiners to be alarmist and call for the toppling of hyperinflation, the toppling of the government, because the truth of the matter is, it's, you know, ultimately, Bitcoin, when it's 10x more than it is, is still 1% of the solution. So, so really, Bitcoin is a solution for the 1% of the people that grab it now, and then 2%, and then 4%. And it's really better if it's incremental. But I think we should all come together at this point and just agree we should be constructively, cheerfully educating the mainstream that Bitcoin is an alternative to banking and an alternative

to fiat currency and do it in the most constructive way possible so that they can join us as opposed to fight us because i think they'll want to join us and everybody wants a solution they don't want another enemy yeah i think it's fair to say that uh if we're living in a world where we have a million dollar bitcoin in 90 days it's going to be mad max and not a world that any of us want to live in i'll make one more point i i think i bought a billion dollars of bitcoin once and i didn't get as much publicity as balaji got by betting a million so i don't know so i don't know who's the fool i don't i i just keep the bill i keep the bitcoin i'm not giving it up but but uh i think Balaji is kind of... You're going to come out of something. He's accomplished something.

Yeah, I mean, I think the downside of alarmism, there's an element of the boy cried wolf. In three months, there's going to be a lot of fiat people dancing on Balaji's

tweet saying, you know, all of these Bitcoiners are always going on about how the system is going to collapse. It's not going to collapse. Bitcoin is not a solution to a real problem. There may be a bit of that, but I still think the overriding theme of the next few months is going to be you won't own money if you have money in a bank. That's not money. that's a lottery ticket and you need to wake up every morning and check that your lottery ticket and i think this uh this idea is the is the key thing that with bitcoin you know you just get it in your private keys yes the price is volatile but nobody can take it away from you nobody can

debase it nobody can take it and gamble that's it can debase it. Nobody can take it and gamble. That's it. It's your private key. That's the only thing that you can own. And I think it's become also increasingly clear that that is not true for altcoins because the consensus parameters of altcoins are very easy to change. You know, you can be the second biggest

digital currency or... You know, Saif, the one thing I agree with you on all this stuff uh but i especially want to punctuate that i that i have noticed in the mainstream media a lot more people are are talking about bitcoin as an alternative to to putting your money in a bank and that they're realizing the benefit of self-custody and they're realizing the benefit of having a decentralized bank. And I think that the amount of news media coverage of Bitcoin as a robust alternative to the banking network has exploded in the past few weeks. And I think that that's really healthy for Bitcoin. And I think it's a great welcome development that finally people are viewing it

as a risk off asset and a safer form of bank and not just viewing it as a way to speculate on money or trading. I agree. I agree entirely. I think the differentiation continues to increase. And this is the time where all of the, you know, during the bull market, all of the apps and all of the people who tell us, oh, well, Bitcoin is boring. Bitcoin is just boomer coin. This is the time when it pays to be boomer coin. Nobody's out there looking for JPEG receipts at this point. People are worried about their actual checking account.

And so they need the boomer coin. And all of these insults essentially end up helping Bitcoin. Because now, yeah, people in the mainstream were not very familiar with the space. At least they're beginning to get this idea that Bitcoin is the old reliable. You know, it's just the grandpa coin. Yeah, that's exactly what people are looking for.

So thank you again for the shift. Thank you again for the shift. Safe, can I punctuate this as BoomerCoin, like Bitcoin, is a replacement for, in essence, the counterparty risk of every bank on earth right now.

That's a big idea. And the second big idea is Bitcoin bitcoin is a replacement and a and a a safer asset to replace every bond on earth right now and so when you understand it as an alternative to a hundred trillion dollars worth of bonds in every single bank on earth the light bulb starts to go off and you think, well, maybe this is an undervalued idea. And there's some legs to this. And I think that that idea, Bitcoin replaces bonds and Bitcoin replaces, I guess most people

are fixated on the fact that Bitcoin replaces banks. I think only 25% of them them a smaller group have figured out that bitcoin also replaces the bonds but that's a massive huge thing and and the thing i would say to the crypto world is is heck bitcoin as currently engineered could replace foundationally all the bonds you know and all the banks as as safe haven stores of value and that's worth a hundred trillion dollars and once you understood that you think yeah I guess it's it has not reached its full potential yet and maybe I ought to be investing in that thing. Can we give the mic to Brad? Brad Mills, I see you in the crowd. Maybe you want the mic? Yeah, thanks.

And Scott, thanks for bringing Saylor on. This is like the one thing I've been hoping for this whole banking crisis, just to have a space with hearing Michael Saylor's thoughts on this stuff. And Michael, I wanted to ask you like a strategic question, because you're probably getting hammered from friends and family and acquaintances and stuff that are kind of now finally curious about Bitcoin. Maybe they weren't so curious about it when you were buying it before, but now that there's actually fear in the markets around banks. And I'm wondering, like, you know, I've been in Bitcoin a long time. There's a firehose of information to drink from when you're trying to onboard somebody to Bitcoin. And when there's a mass adoption cycle that happens because of a specific event, it's really difficult to manage

your time and efficiently like help people onto the lifeboats. So I wonder if you've thought about just for this specific period of time where there's this ongoing banking crisis, you don't need to tell everybody about all the different use cases of Bitcoin and maybe not explain all the, you know, electronic money properties and all that stuff. But just like, hey, this is the problem. The banks are failing. This is the solution. Get some Bitcoin.

And then later on, you can plug into the firehose. So I'm wondering if there's something that you do specifically to optimize your time and be more efficient with how you're responding to people that are curious. Is there a one pager you give them or like where do you tell them to start well um i i say bitcoin is hope and type in hope.com and send them to hope.com because that's a that's a single website that's got all of the bitcoin materials it's got the courses it's got the. It's got the courses. It's got the videos. It's got the resources. It's got links to books like the Bitcoin Standard. It's got links to all the Bitcoin leaders. It's got links to all the Bitcoin websites.

So I would just, to anybody I met on the street, I'd say, you want to understand Bitcoin, go to hope.com. That's a start. There are also some other great websites if you've got one. I think I agree with you that we should just stay focused. The other thing I do, Brad, is I keep my laser eyes on, right? And, you know, like laser eyes are not laser ray to 100K. Laser eyes mean that Bitcoin is an instrument of

economic empowerment and you can make the world better for 8 billion people. And I'm going to focus on telling them that. So I keep the laser eyes on. If you go to my Twitter profile and you look at the top, the first word, I basically, I reorganized it. The first word is Bitcoin. And the first sentence is Bitcoin is hope. And hope points to that website.

And then it's BTC, right? So, so I have oriented myself to basically tell everybody, this is where you go, this is what you do, this is the answer. And, you know, I, I empathize with every day there's something, you know, that you could notice and complain about, or you could try to fix but you know i kind of just limit or focus my bandwidth on telling people why bitcoin is the fix if you look at my tweet this morning it literally says save yourself with bitcoin okay with Bitcoin. Okay. Like, you know, we couldn't, I could write a page. I could write a book that's an indictment on, you know, every policy decision that I disagree with. I could write a hundred books, a thousand books. But ultimately, Brad, I think, I think that the, that the ethical basis of LaserEyes is we found a technology protocol to provide property rights to 8 billion people and improve the world. The world doesn't know it.

We're going to spread the word. Right. anything that that makes it easier to understand bitcoin that makes it safer that makes it less risky that makes it simpler that makes it quicker anything we can do is a good thing and so i just come back to that and then i i try not to get myself embroiled in other discussions you know and trying to solve other problems i mean there's a hundred other battles to fight but at the end of the day i'm of the opinion that you have to choose your battles and you have to figure out which one can you win and there's there's there's one thing right there's one thing that is working that i think we can win in and And I'm sure about that. And so I just try to avoid getting distracted by everything else.

I said once before, I said, the thing I regret in my business career is pursuing my good ideas to the detriment of my great idea. Right? So there's one great idea and my criticism of, of the entire crypto industry is for a while they were pursuing too many good ideas to the detriment of the great idea. I'd like to see us come back to the great idea because there's a lot more work to be done on the great idea. That's that's that's great. Bruce Fenton, I think you got your hand up as well. Hey, thanks a lot lot thanks for hosting this

thanks michael uh safe everybody this is really great convo um michael i'm curious uh you mentioned securities a couple times and you know i'm curious what your thoughts are in a bitcoin world in a world of a bitcoin standard you know what do you see security you know what do you see securities looking like in you know five to ten years or something you know do you think that the settlement will be fiat or you know bitcoin um do you you know have you looked at like do you think things will be tokenized you know i'll keep my comments a little bit short but i think that in the world of here's my here's my view of the universe you know This is a financial universe that's got $1,000 trillion in it, of which Bitcoin is half a trillion. So Bitcoin is currently somewhere in the range of 0.1% of the financial universe. So in that universe, I think that as long as there are nation states like the United States or Japan, there will be national fiat currencies.

I don't expect that to change in the next 30 years. I will not forecast beyond 30 years. But weak nation states will lose their currency like El Salvador. Strong nation states will keep their currency. And over time, I think that the nation state currencies will migrate toward the strongest. And so probably the weak 80 currencies will collapse into the dollar. But the dollar, the CNY, the whatever, they'll compete with each other. And that's going to continue.

And there'll be inflationary currencies. That's not going to change. I think as long as there are corporations and enterprises like Apple Computer and Google and Facebook, there will be securities because, you know, securities represent ownership of a corporation. I don't think Apple is going to go away in the next 90 days. I think the United States will be here, you know, in 10 years. I think that Apple Computer will be here in 10 years, right? So securities will exist. And I think that the question mark is,

and then of course, I think there's a world of commodities like oil and natural gas and the like. And I think there's one great scarcity, Bitcoin. And as a scarcity, the first scarcity in the history of the world, the only scarcity that I know of, it is the global money. So I think that Bitcoin will go from 0.1% to 1% to 2% to 4% to 8% to 10%. But let's keep in mind when Bitcoin is trading at two and a half million dollars a coin,

it will be 10%. And it will still just be the reserve asset of the world. But 90% of the world will be other stuff floating around and we could be two and a half million a coin. And that could take some amount of time. So I do think there's a place for currencies because I'm not ready to, I'm not ready to call for the complete meltdown of all nation states in the world. That's not going to happen, at least not anytime soon. And I do think that when they do meltdown, when you have anarchy, then people throw away their local currency and they adopt the dollar or something like in Africa. You know, like the African countries don't have their own currency. They have the CFA, right? So when the countries are weak weak they use a foreign currency

and i think that um they're you know in the world of digital assets you have a you have a 20th century uh analog world which is analog credit cards and analog securities that trade 930 to 4 on nasdaq and analog banks and, you know, correspondent banks and everything's held together by bailing wire and rubber bands and it's inefficient and slow. That's the analog digital world, the analog finance world. And if I move money 40 times on a credit card network, I lose all the money and it takes like eight years. And then there's a digital world.

And the most beautiful version of the digital world is like Bitcoin with a lightning type protocol on top of it where I could move the money 40 times in 40 seconds and I could keep all the money. And in the digital world, I know that Bitcoin and lightning will be there or other open permissionless ethical protocols will be there i believe in that i you know i think that the future of digital securities like these crypto tokens or digital currencies like tether and circle and the future of digital nfts and the future of digital tokens like if tom brady wants to issue Tom Brady token and it's a super fan token to 10,000 people and they have the right to go to his barbecue once a year and get online chat and spaces with him. If he wants to issue that, like it's not clear what the regulatory treatment will be. Right now, there is no asset framework for digital exchanges, digital tokens,

digital securities, digital currencies, and there's no way to register a digital commodity. So there is no framework right now. Congress needs to create one. The SEC has not offered a framework. Congress has not created one. And so right now, we're living in a regressive world where it's clinging to the 20th century analog assets, and they have to be 20th century commodities, securities, and the like. It's very inefficient, and it is what it is. But there's pressure to deconstruct that and rebuild that in the 21st century model with 24-7, 365, digital, everything,

it's going to be a struggle, a political struggle and a legal struggle between the innovators and the 20th century establishment. And right now, the innov, aren't winning that battle. So that's a challenge. But ultimately, as a technologist, I think the world would be a better place if there was a regulatory framework and a registration process to register a token, a security, a commodity, a currency, and an exchange. And so I would love to see that offered right now that it's just not offered. So that's a, I guess that's my answer to, you know, what happens. And I'll make one last point. MicroStrategies is a security that trades 930 to four. There's no way for me to make it a digital security that trades on a crypto exchange on Saturday. There's no way for me to do it. If I wanted to do it, there's no proposal to allow it

to ever happen, even though we completely, you know, we disclose via all of our financial filings, you know, all of our securities disclosures. There's just no framework for it right now. So I would say there is a big vacuum of political leadership here that needs to be filled by politicians. They need to put forth a law or put forth a rule that allows this to happen. And until that happens, the only safe haven is Bitcoin, because the only universally acknowledged digital commodity is Bitcoin. And the only way forward is non-custodial open permissionless protocols that are universally agreed upon. And Bitcoin is the only one.

And anything that takes any other type of risk is you're in a compliance zone and you need an army of lawyers. And the truth is, I just don't see any way to do those things with any amount of money. If I gave you $10 billion and 10,000 lawyers, I don't see how to do it right now. That is the frustration of the crypto industry. And I empathize with them on that basis. There's no path forward. Thank you.

Dave, I see you have your hand up. Feel free to speak. Yeah, first of all, thank you, Michael. That was a very brilliant segue, because the fact that we have no regulatory way forward is a big problem. You know, your point on that there's no framework is clear. What's fascinating is, because I've seen this before, I mean, for those who know me, you know, but I mean, I built the first program trading system on Wall Street in the 80s. And at the time, we were considered horrible by everyone else on Wall Street, because they were making eight cents a share trading high touch trading. And here we were automating. And I can't tell you how many thousands of

meetings I sat in over my career where we were called cannibalistic to their businesses. It's why in 1990, all the technologists on Wall Street thought that all markets will be fully electronic, like in years. And I said, no, it's going to probably take 15 years. Turned out that was almost a perfect analysis because people there's a lot of money being made. The reality is and what what you talk about, but is true is digital market structure is superior to analog market structure in so many ways. But what we'll do is disintermediate Wall Street and take away a lot of economic rent. Well, that sounds great to the individuals. The people on Wall Street really don't like losing economic rent. Well, that sounds great to the individuals. The people on Wall Street really don't like losing economic rent. And when you bring it down to what we just saw, a banking collapse, right? What was the bank? What was the root cause of it? The root cause of it was undisclosed risks.

Companies, banks had bought treasuries for 100 bucks and now they're worth 70 dollars. And they didn't tell anybody that they didn't even tell their own auditors that, which sounds suspiciously like what happened with centralized crypto firms last summer, taking risks of a variety of ways and not telling anybody about it. The truth is, you contrast that, as you say all the time, Bitcoin is the most transparent asset on Earth. Whenever I say that in front of TradFi friends, they look at me like I'm crazy. But it's not just the blockchain. It's also the way it's traded. The markets have grown up to give all that data away and to make it very, very clear. And if you look at the promise

of DeFi, promise of DeFi is a more transparent and competitive system. There are a lot of people who don't like that. And I think the answer of the then they fight us, then you win is true. But I agree with you. I think your point of incremental progress is where we need to be focused. And, you know, if the regulators learn one lesson, I mean, it was amazing on one day, Wednesday of two weeks ago, that they were blaming crypto with Silvergate. And then the very next day, Silicon Valley Bank happens and people start realizing the magnitude of the problem. And there hasn't been a peep since. Doesn't mean the regulators aren't still focused,

but there really hasn't been a peep since because it makes them look really bad. So I kind of think that that's important. But you're right. I mean, it has to be incremental progress. And I don't see any way around it. We just have to stick to our guns. Transparency, open competition is what's necessary here. I mean, I think the key is just to be constructive at this point. I think that you have to ask, where should you spend your money and where should you spend your energy? And you've got a scarce amount of bandwidth. And so what can you do and what can you say that will actually be constructive? And getting, installing that regulatory framework for digital assets, that's the job of people

in the industry, they should do their job, right? And fixing the banking system is a different job. And then fixing a currency is a different job. What we can do is we can constructively, cheerfully advocate and commercialize Bitcoin. And since only 0.1% adoption has taken place, it seems to me like we've got an easy 10x in front of us and we'll still just be 1%. Yeah, I think the other thing that's interesting along that when you talk about adoption is people who have seen this before, it's really bringing the cost down and making the frictional cost get lower and lower. In a pure Bitcoin standard, there's no need for that because everyone's just exchanging Bitcoin for value. But in this intermediate phase that we're in, the incremental

phase that you described, the fact is that the ability to trade Bitcoin and exchange value has gotten significantly less expensive for people who need to know. But the regulators taking out and kneecapping the transfer methods, you know, the Cigna being the key. And we did a study of coin routes and we saw that in the first weekend, the literal cost, the differences in prices between bitcoins, you know, on various exchanges went up by a factor of 10. It's still a factor of four, and we don't really know. The fact is, is we're still in that in-between state and need to be able to work with the system. And it's pretty clear the system will work. And it's pretty clear that if we don't do it in the United States, that Europe, the U.K., Singapore, Hong Kong now, there are many other jurisdictions who will. And I think that's really the constructive point that needs to be made.