About Michael Saylor: Michael J. Saylor is an American entrepreneur and business executive, who co-founded and leads MicroStrategy, a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. Saylor authored the 2012 book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything.
In this video, Michael Saylor discusses the significance of Bitcoin and its role in fixing the defects in gold and other fiat currencies. He refers to Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Lebanon as examples of countries with collapsed currencies.
Bitcoin, Saylor asserts, is the first engineered monetary system in the history of the human race. It is an asset sitting on an open computer network, and it won't exceed 21 million or 2.1 quadrillion Satoshis. Bitcoin has come to fix the defects associated with gold. The fundamental problem with the gold standard, he says, is that there is no mathematical protocol or engineering protocol that links the paper gold or the fiat derivatives to the underlying asset.
So, as soon as the US got control of the gold supply, they kept printing more money. When other countries realized the US was printing too much money, they started asking for the gold back and gold was flowing outside the US. The then US president Nixon said he couldn't keep giving people gold back. So we defaulted on the gold standard and everybody is now free to print as much money as they want.
Another issue raised by Saylor is the loss of purchasing power associated with fiat currencies. For example, if you don't put your money in the S&P Index, you'll lose 7% of your purchasing power every year for a decade. So, in the Western world, the store of value is shifting your assets to ETFs, Index funds, and stocks.
Saylor explains that Bitcoin has come to cater to the “unbanked” people who are segregated from the financial world.
Apart from that, Bitcoin has come to eliminate the enormous fees charged by financial service providers such as Visa, MasterCard, and banks, for money transfer and the delays associated with such.
In addition, Saylor says, Bitcoin is unique in that with your smartphone, you can download your software wallet and send money instantly for free on a lightning network. If you store your money in Bitcoin, it will rise in value. You're not at the mercy of financial institutions and you're not losing your purchasing power. Other fiat currencies lose value every year.
Most currencies are pegged to the dollar and the problem is that the US dollar which used to lose half a percent a month is now losing two percent a month because the Fed keeps printing money. So, to get out of such a problem, Saylor affirms, you must adopt Bitcoin, as done by the president of El Salvador. That is, back your currency with an asset that is appreciating.
Bitcoin is appreciating 120% every year while the S&P is appreciating 12% a year for a decade while gold appreciates by 2%. So, Bitcoin is the perfect apex property of the human race that you should buy for your children to inherit.
