Micheal Saylor was the latest guest on the Lex Friedman podcast. During the almost 4-hour-long discussion, Saylor and Friedman discussed a varied array of topics such as Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money.
Saylors thinks that most economic ideas are bad ideas. Saylor says,
“I think that the fundamental problem is: if you see the world as a scalar, you simply pick the one number which supports whatever you want to do, and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior.”
On inflation, Saylor says CPI understates the human anguish caused by the political elite on the working class and mainstream businesses. As a result, there has been a tremendous transfer of wealth from the working to the property classes. It represents a tremendous transfer of power from the free market to the centralized or regulated market. It represents a significant transfer of power from the people to the government.
Speaking about Bitcoin, the BTC maximalist says that Bitcoin is the most famous manifestation of digital energy. It is a crypto asset that has monetary value.
He states,
“The goal is to create a billion dollar block of pure energy in cyberspace.”
A bushel of corn, an acre of land, a stack of timber, a bar of gold, and a Bitcoin (BTC), according to Saylor, are all property, which means they’re all naturally occurring. One might call them commodities, but that’s a little deceptive.
Bitcoin (BTC), Saylor says, is a lot more difficult for authorities to confiscate, compared to other assets like gold and oil. He goes on to say that Bitcoin is the most secure, and most durable crypto asset in the world, and its value will only keep going up.
A stock, on the other hand, will never be a non-sovereign bearer instrument, according to Saylor. It is not a worldwide permissionless open entity, and the rest of the world will never trust it.
Layers of Bitcoin
Saylor delves into Layer 1 of Bitcoin, calling it the property settlement layer. Layer 1 has a bandwidth on Layer 1 is 100 million transactions a year.
The role of layer 1 is two things, as said by Saylor. The first is to move a large sum of money through space, with security. The second important feature of layer 1 is it enables the money to not lose its value over time. The idea is not to move a billion dollars from one place to another, but rather to move a billion dollars through time, for eg. “from here to 2140” as said by Saylor.
BTC’s role in wartime
Saylor says that Bitcoin is a universal trust protocol or a universal energy protocol. He cites the example that the Russian payment app will not work in Ukraine and vice versa. The same applies to any other country in the world.
The fact that many in war zones are not able to use cryptocurrencies at the moment, for example, Russia is not able to fully evade sanctions using Bitcoin or crypto, is because the crypto community is at a very early stage, according to Saylor. He says that the human race’s adoption of crypto is still at an embryonic stage. We are only 1% or 2% down the adoption curve, as per Saylor.