I think 2026 is going to be a great year for Bitcoin.
If you want everybody on earth to use Bitcoin and every company on earth to use Bitcoin,
you had to cure some fundamental problems.
This entire community has very short memory,
and whatever happened in the past five days dominates the conversation.
We've got the world's greatest financial technology.
Is there opportunity for people, for entrepreneurs or corporations
to do good.
Everything in history,
it's a continual never-ending power struggle
over money, over power.
Everybody in the world can buy Bitcoin
as part of their investment,
but not everybody is going to have as much as me.
Mr. Michael Saylor,
thank you very much for having us here in Miami.
Happy New Year.
Same to you.
2026.
Hopefully it's better than 2025.
Bitcoin's 17 years old.
17 years old. It's pretty wild. And last year was kind of disappointing for Bitcoin, I think.
It's definitely not what I expected to happen in the year. And for treasury companies as well,
especially the back half of the year was really rough. Did you expect that going into 2025?
You know, I don't think it's a disappointing year. The only way in which it's disappointing
is the price at the very end of the year. Do you know when the all-time high was?
Would it have been about August?
October 6th.
October 6th, okay.
Early October, first week of October.
You know how many days it's been since the all-time high of Bitcoin?
I mean, it must be like 100 days or something.
Yeah, Grok thinks like 95 days.
Yeah.
Okay, so, by the way, you know, October.
The last quarter of the year is October, November, December.
Literally, the first week of the last quarter of the year,
Bitcoin hit an all-time high.
So in what way is it a disappointing year?
This entire community has very short memory,
and whatever happened in the past five days dominates the conversation.
But if I look at 2025, I think, well, I think in 2024,
we had like 30 to 60 companies that had Bitcoin on their balance sheet,
and by the end of 2025, we had like 200.
OK, so the fundamentals look pretty good to me.
We hit an all-time high.
We added 100 companies with Bitcoin on the balance sheet.
I think my company raised something like $25 billion.
And it all went into Bitcoin.
So we bought $25 billion of Bitcoin in 2025.
OK, this entire journey, Danny, started in August of 2020 with a $250 million purchase.
OK, so 10x times 250 is $2.5 billion.
We bought 100 times as much Bitcoin in 2025 as we did in August of 2020.
And when we bought in August of 2020, that was the greatest amount of capital ever deployed in the Bitcoin network that anybody could remember in the history of the world.
So 100x more than that strikes me as being a pretty good fundamental progression.
You know, if I tick off what happened in 2025, we hit the all-time high.
We had 100 Bitcoin companies come online.
fair value accounting for Bitcoin, you know, was instituted at the beginning of the year.
You know, it's crippling to the asset class. If you can only lose money, you can never make money.
So if we're going to actually institutionalize and commercialize Bitcoin and globalize Bitcoin,
if you want everybody on earth to use Bitcoin and every company on earth to use Bitcoin,
you had to cure some fundamental problems. One, when we bought Bitcoin in 2020,
our insurance company dropped us. We got de-insured. A lot of people got de-banked.
You know, we got, in essence, when the accounting system said it's indefinite and tangible,
we can't make money, you got de-profitized, you know? And when we rolled into the first
week of 2020, what happened? We got our insurance back. For four years, I had to underwrite the
insurance of the company. The company at one point had 20, 30, $40 billion of assets. We couldn't buy
a $40 million insurance policy. Wow. Like strategy wouldn't exist if I had not personally insured
the company with my own personal assets. It wouldn't have happened. So we got our insurance
back in 2025. We got our profits back in 2025. We went to fair value accounting, and now it's
possible for a company to make money. We had the corporate alternative minimum tax question
hanging overhead. Is there going to be an unrealized capital gains tax on public companies
holding Bitcoin? That was resolved with positive guidance from the administration in 2025.
So we didn't have an unrealized capital gains tax hit us.
Then we got legitimized as the primary and the greatest global digital commodity in the world by the administration in 2025.
That happened at the White House summit and with a television interview that David Sachs gave.
And then we hit an all-time high, you know.
And if I look at all those things, and by the way, at the beginning of the year, I couldn't get a nickel loan on a billion dollars of Bitcoin collateral.
A nickel.
So we were debanked.
We were, you know, there was no credit.
And by the end of the year, the majority of the major banks in the United States were extending credit against IBIT.
And like a quarter of them had announced plans to start extending credit against BTC.
So I would say we start 2026.
And by the way, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley both talking about buying, selling, handling Bitcoin.
So now you've got bankers moving with bank acceptance.
You got positive guidance from the Treasury Department for crypto assets on a bank balance sheet.
You got a pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto head of the CFTC and Mike Selig.
You got a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin head of the SEC and Paul Adkins.
You got a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin president, cabinet member.
You got universal utterance.
You also had the commercialization of the Bitcoin derivatives market on the CME.
We had all of the handcuffs taken off of IBIT stock options.
You also got in-kind create and redemption where you could swap a million dollars of Bitcoin for a million of IBIT and vice versa.
Swap a million of IBIT for a million of Bitcoin without a taxable event.
so if i had a checklist of all the fundamentals necessary for the asset to be commercialized and
globalized and institutionalized you got everything that you wanted in 2025 and you you even got an
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Yes.
And like fundamentally,
like everything you're saying is obviously incredibly bullish for Bitcoin.
By the way, didn't you take over what Bitcoin did in 2025?
It was actually the end of 24, but yeah, that might be the most bullish thing.
It was a big year for you too.
It was a big year.
Okay.
But like even fundamentally, those are very bullish things.
I totally agree.
But the price is lower today than it was this time last year.
And like, I don't know if this is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy
over sort of people thinking a four-year cycle is a real thing
and therefore there's selling a Bitcoin.
I mean, I think the four-year cycle is dead.
What do you think is going to happen in 2026?
Look, I think that trying to guess where the market goes over a hundred day time frame is a fool's errand.
Like I literally just said 95 days ago, we were at an all time high and you're complaining about Bitcoin price action.
Like, you know, we have the attention, you know, of sixth graders, not even sixth graders.
It's not complaining.
Name one thing in your life you accomplished in less than 100 days.
Like you can't, you're supposed to have, you can't have a baby in less than 100 days.
You can't get a college degree in less than 100 days.
How many companies were started and declared successful in less than 100 days?
You know, was what Bitcoin did made successful in 94 days, right?
I mean, if you actually did a test on every single human endeavor for the last 100,000 years, like, and you said, well, I'm going to cancel them all if they weren't successful on the 93rd day.
Like, first of all, nothing and none of us would be here.
Right.
So I think it's a mistake to fixate on short frequency events.
The whole message of Bitcoin is you're supposed to have a low time preference.
So I think that if you're an investor, if you're an investor, if you're buying a company,
if you're investing in a company, expecting it to be successful in less than four years
just marks you as naive.
Like name a venture capitalist that would say that if the company that I invested in
isn't a screaming success in less than four years, that I'm just going to sell my investment.
Yeah, it doesn't exist.
Yeah, it doesn't exist. So if you're an investor, you need a four-year time frame. But if you're a progressive, if you're an ideologue, okay, so you got up and you decided that you wanted to change the world by spreading an ideology, you probably need a 10-year time frame.
You know, so if we go back and ask, well, how long did it take Gandhi to get where he wanted?
I mean, look at the history of every ideological movement, you know, for the last 10,000 years.
Normally, people that are deemed to be committed to something have a 10-year time frame.
And if you did something for, by the way, the world's full of people that spent 10 years working on something and they still weren't successful.
It took them another 10 or 20 years.
But I think that if your goal is to see Bitcoin commercialized, you really shouldn't be analyzing or you shouldn't be assessing your success with a frequency of 10 weeks or even 10 months.
So, I mean, what does it matter what happens in 2026 with the price?
Do you know, take electricity.
you know how long it went it took to go from four percent of factories running on electricity to
75 percent no idea of factories 30 years okay so if you're an electricity maxi and you think
by the way electricity is probably the single greatest development of our lifetime take away
electricity all the cities die you know your florida becomes uninhabitable hospitals don't
work. Refrigeration doesn't work. Half the planet dies. And so I give you the gift of clean,
invisible, efficient energy that revolutionizes the world. And it still takes 30 years
before 70% of the people agree with you. Okay, so Bitcoin is digital energy. It's digital capital.
it's the basis of digital credit it's the basis of digital money it's developing very rapidly
we're making great inroads you know you're like well the four-year cycle is dead
well the irony is the people that are saying that haven't waited four years
like we've only been 95 days since the peak of the cycle okay so how about i think that if you
actually assess Bitcoin's performance on a rolling four-year moving average, you see a
progression that looks pretty bullish. I think 2026 is going to be a great year for Bitcoin.
But I think that you shouldn't be roped into trying to forecast what is the price in 90 days
or the price in 108 aces.
It's kind of like saying,
well, 6% of the factories in Detroit have electricity.
Well, what percentage of the factories
will have electricity in 12 months?
Well, you're wrong, and therefore electricity is awful.
It's like, Jesus Christ, it took 30 years
for people to embrace the most obvious invention
in the world.
And the same goes with radio,
the same goes with television,
The same goes with, you know, I mean, I think the greatest and most amazing thing of our lifetime, Danny, is probably the most profound technology invention of the 20th century was nuclear power.
Like, here's a reactor.
It generates a gigawatt of energy, and it does it without any obvious admissions.
It's like unlimited clean energy.
And that was a gift to humanity.
And in 1973, we turned it all off.
Like in 1973, the United States decided that they were afraid of nuclear power.
Which is totally insane.
It's one of the safest as well.
We can't really trace a death in the United States to nuclear power,
but we can trace hundreds of thousands of deaths a year to coal
or to fossil fuels or to pollution.
And the same people that turned off nuclear power,
they embraced wood-burning stoves and coal and every type of fossil fuel,
and they embraced wars in the Middle East and they embraced, you know, every alternative,
everything imaginable rather than turn on unlimited free clean energy because a successful
marketing campaign convinced them that it was scary and dangerous. We literally saw millions,
if not tens of millions of people die in wars fighting over alternatives to nuclear energy.
And we saw tens of millions of people die of pollution from alternatives to nuclear energy.
and then the population of Germany turns off all their nuclear power plants.
I think the Simpsons scared everyone.
Yeah, and so I think you have to reason from first principles.
And I guess my message is people all of a sudden discovered that nuclear power plants aren't a bad idea
when they needed unlimited electricity for AI.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden it just flipped after 50 years of skepticism.
we flipped to, oh, nuclear is cool again.
Because when Apple and Google and Meta and Facebook and Amazon needed nuclear
and OpenAI needed nuclear, like, okay, I guess we like it now.
It literally was like overnight.
If you were to trace that debate, we went from 50 years of skepticism
and cynicism to massive enthusiasm because people realized
that they needed electricity and they needed a lot of electricity. And so if humanity can fight
through 50 years of nuclear skepticism to come out of that, then I think that 94 days of Bitcoin
skepticism is not something that we ought to be that skeptical about. I mean, the bottom line is
after 10 years of not doing nuclear, right, the nuclear power plant had a, you know, the nuclear
winter, right? The nuclear bear market went from 1973 to 2023. It's 50 years. That was the bear
market. And I can tell you from firsthand knowledge, I remember talking to a bunch of
power companies in 2021, you know, just after the lockdowns, during the COVID crisis, you know,
and energy usage sagged, they were literally all in the process of decommissioning all the
nuclear power plants they operated, half the nuclear power plants of the US that people wanted
to decommission them. They were going to decommission the Diablo Canyon power plant in
California. They were all bragging about it, like, oh, we don't need these things. And that was
literally four years ago. That's crazy. And then in like 2023, we had the chat GPT moment.
And then at some point, political sentiment flipped and electricity became cool again
and power usage became cool.
Remember how the ESG movement?
It disappeared very quickly.
Disappeared.
Yeah.
It was like, remember when there was the big ESG attack on Bitcoin?
Like Bitcoin can use electricity or else that the end And I think we all kind of got saved by chat GPT because once we realized that the hyperscalers
were going to use 10 times as much energy
as the Bitcoin industry,
it became a rounding error.
It was suddenly okay.
And people decided maybe electricity was cool again
and power was cool again.
So I think you've got to think for yourself
and you've got to think from first principles.
and first principles suggest that
unlimited clean energy
from a nuclear reactor is a good idea
when the alternative is burning wood
or burning whatever.
And I think first principles suggest
that digital intelligence is good.
All you got to do is go and use these things
and they work, right?
And you're like, okay, yeah, I want that.
Like everybody wants that, right?
If you use AI, everybody wants that.
And then I think, you know, do I want to be able to move money at the speed of light and store it forever in cyberspace?
Of course I do.
So has my conviction been swayed by 94 days of not hitting an all-time high?
No, I'm going to go on the record and say that I have an endurance of more than 94 days.
Yeah.
And it's kind of a joke, right?
Because there's no educated person that didn't go to school for 16 years.
94 days is not a lot.
94 days is not a lot of time to carry the flag.
And so if I have to do it for 1,094 days, I could do that too.
That would still be less time than it took me to get through MIT and get an undergraduate degree.
And by the way, after four years at MIT and undergraduate degree, you're still not deemed to be educated by polite society.
Most sophisticated society, they would say, well, you need a master's degree to be a competent practitioner at the top of your field.
So their position is 12 years of secondary school, four years of undergraduate, two years of graduate.
and now you're ready to be a productive member of society.
So that's 18 years, Danny.
Bitcoin's 17 years old.
And we just had our 17th birthday on January 3rd.
And so Bitcoin, after 17 years, is a $2 trillion asset.
And it's been embraced by hundreds of publicly traded companies
and hundreds of millions of people.
and it's been almost 100 days since our last all-time high, I think I'm feeling pretty bullish
and I'm pretty happy about where we are. And if you gave me a choice, if you said, Mike,
you can either have Bitcoin 150,000, but I'm going to roll back the banking acceptance,
the options acceptance, the positive regulators at the CFTC, the SEC or Treasury, or I'm going to
roll back. In fact, if you said, I'll give you $150,000, but you have to pick one of these things
to roll back, you have to give up the CAMTI win, or you have to give up the FASB win, or you have
to give up the support of the Treasury, or you have to give up the support of the SEC, or give up the
support of the CFTC, or you have to give up the support of the banking community for IBIT,
or you have to give up the fact that Citi and Schwab are moving to trade in custody of Bitcoin.
If I had to give up just one of those things in return for an all-time high,
the answer is I would give up the all-time high.
And this is kind of like adult-like behavior.
I would give up immediate gratification for the next 90 days
in order to get the support of the multi-trillion dollar banking industry
or the most powerful regulator in the world.
Or maybe the ability to make money or to be deemed as profitable.
So I don't think there's any question in my mind.
The industry is evolving the right way.
The network is evolving the right way.
And the last 90 days are just an opportunity for, you know,
someone that's got clear eyes to buy more Bitcoin.
Yeah.
And I'm also very bullish on Bitcoin going into 2026.
The thing that I guess surprised me somewhat in 2025
was just how many treasury companies turned up.
Because when you first announced
that strategy were buying Bitcoin,
I thought we were going to have a lot of people
copying you much, much earlier.
But really, it wasn't until last year
that we saw the floodgates open
and a lot of companies come in.
I've been very skeptical of a lot of the treasury companies.
I think strategy and a few of the other larger ones,
well, strategy's in a league of its own.
You've got over 650,000 Bitcoin.
I think the preferreds are really interesting, again, kind of set you aside.
What do you think of all the companies that are still doing the very simple, like, sell equity, buy Bitcoin playbook?
Well, I guess what I would say is everybody in the world can buy Bitcoin as part of their investment.
But not everybody is going to have as much as me.
But, you know, they could all buy it.
I'm not skeptical of any of them.
They buy it.
Every family can buy Bitcoin.
Some families will have more Bitcoin than other families.
I'm not skeptical of a family's decision.
Every company can buy Bitcoin.
Some companies will have more Bitcoin than others.
It's a good idea for all of them to buy it, right?
Whether they're sort of cashflow positive businesses or not.
if a company is not cash flow positive then it's just not a good company right but we see a lot of
these companies crop up that really don't have a business all they're doing is trying to issue
debt and buy bitcoin okay well aren't there plenty of people like individuals that don't have a
business and they buy bitcoin too are you going to criticize them no i just don't know why like if
you're not as rich as Bill Gates and you buy Bitcoin,
should I criticize you?
No, of course not.
But the problem I have, I guess,
is why would anyone buy shares in that company
as opposed to one strategy?
Well, every company has a different value proposition.
By the way, Danny,
the whole point,
the message I've delivered every day
for the past five years is buy Bitcoin
because there's a lot of counterparty risk
when you invest in a company.
Like, why do you buy NVIDIA?
Why do you buy Apple?
Why do you buy Coca-Cola?
Why do you buy Disney?
Why do you buy an airline?
There's the old story, how do you become a millionaire,
start with a billion and invest in an airline?
Okay, the world's full of companies that are bad investments.
Right?
The world's full of them.
There's 400 million companies.
So the question for you is,
why haven't you invested in any of the 400 million?
Because I buy Bitcoin.
OK, so criticizing a company that buys Bitcoin misses the point.
Well, why don't you criticize all the companies that don't buy Bitcoin?
Are they even worse?
The answer is there are some companies that have very good businesses and their cash flow positive.
And there are some companies that have very awful businesses and their cash flow negative.
OK, if you take a good business and you buy Bitcoin, it's a better business.
If you take a bad business, a business that's losing money and you buy Bitcoin, you might very well offset the operating results, right?
If you're losing $10 million a year in the operating business and you hold $100 million of Bitcoin on the balance sheet and you're making $30 million in capital gains on the balance sheet, then actually, now the question is, you're going to criticize that business for what?
like I give you a business that's losing 10 million a year and it's got 100 million in cash
and its choice is to buy Bitcoin and probably make 30 million in unrealized gains or Bitcoin gains
or to give away the money, right? Buy back its stock. I mean, what would you do? Take the $100
million and buy back your stock. If you had a money losing business, would you buy back your
stock. I'd buy Bitcoin. But by the way, when you buy back the stock of a money losing business,
aren't you just amplifying your losses three times as fast? Like if I had $100 million in cash
and I bought the stock of a money losing business, I would just be going out of business faster,
right? That's not smart. If I had 100 million and I bought treasury bills yielding 3%,
then okay, well, so I'm making 3 million a year, but I'm losing 10 million a year. So I'm just
going out of business like one third slower, right? If I took the $100 million and I bought
Bitcoin with it, and Bitcoin goes up 30% a year for the next 20 years to create a simple model,
I'm generating $30 million of Bitcoin gains. I've got $10 million of losses.
Now I'm making $20 million a year. Didn't I just save the company?
So why are you criticizing that company? I mean, the criticism is not that they bought Bitcoin.
The criticism is that they're losing money.
OK, well, I'll give you a choice.
You can invest in a company that's losing $10 million a year with no Bitcoin, or you can
invest in a company that's losing $10 million a year and making $30 million a year off the
Bitcoin and making $20 million a year.
Which of the two would you invest in?
But I guess the question more is, though, do you think the market can sustain this many
treasury companies?
Because we see, especially the smaller ones, almost all of them are now trading at a significant
discount to them now.
I think you're just missing the point.
like the Bitcoin community tends to eat its young.
They would rather criticize a company that buys Bitcoin
than criticize a company that doesn't buy Bitcoin.
Why don't you focus upon criticizing the money losing companies
that don't own Bitcoin?
Why would you buy them?
I agree with that.
Why aren't you criticizing them?
No, I agree with that.
But it's not that I'm criticizing them.
It's just that the shareholders in some of these other treasury companies
are getting absolutely crushed.
And is there any way that some of these companies ever get back to a 1XM nav?
Yeah, I just don't accept the criticism.
You made an investment in a company.
Why did you invest in the company?
My problem with the premise is you somehow think that it's OK for 400 million companies to not buy Bitcoin, and you like that.
And you're going to criticize the 200 companies that bought Bitcoin.
And that's the thing, that's your brilliance?
How is it brilliant for you to ignore the fact that 400 million companies didn't buy Bitcoin
and somehow that's okay and you're going to criticize the 200 companies that bought Bitcoin?
That's not the criticism I'm making.
You're just criticizing someone that bought an equity at the wrong price.
Why don't you actually put the focus upon the people that make the investment decision?
The companies don't determine the price their stock trades at.
So my point here is, what is your brilliant insight, Danny,
that people shouldn't buy Bitcoin?
Is that what you're trying to say?
No, I think people buying Bitcoin is cool.
Okay, well, if it's okay for Bitcoin,
well, what about an unemployed person?
You want to criticize them for buying Bitcoin?
Of course not.
Well, what if you have debt?
You want to criticize the person with debt for buying Bitcoin?
Of course not.
Well, then why are you criticizing a company for buying Bitcoin?
I mean, I'm not criticizing it.
If it's a good company that buys Bitcoin is better.
And if it's a bad company that buys Bitcoin is better than it would have been.
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No, I'm not criticizing any company here at all.
I'm just saying I'm skeptical of whether the market can sustain like 200 plus treasury companies.
Because what I don't understand is...
Why would you... That's kind of like saying I'm skeptical that the market can sustain 200 people to buy Bitcoin.
No, because it's not...
What's the difference?
It's the idea of just issuing debt to buy Bitcoin rather than being like a cash flow positive business.
That's just an ignorant, offensive statement on your part.
Please tell me why.
Like, who are you to say they're just issuing debt to buy Bitcoin, right?
You said that.
Like, there's 400 million companies in the world.
You're going to take the position that only 10 can buy Bitcoin?
Why can't all 400 million companies buy Bitcoin?
Of course they can.
Well, don't they do things?
Yeah.
Okay.
But it's the companies that don't do anything that I am.
Again, I'm not criticizing anyone.
Okay, but you're not criticizing a company that buys Bitcoin.
You're criticizing a company that doesn't do anything.
Yeah.
Okay, well, there's 400 million companies.
How many of the 400 million don't do anything?
Why don't you just focus on that?
We can agree that you shouldn't invest in companies that don't do anything
to make a rational decision.
But can we just leave it at that?
I mean, I just think it's kind of a silly notion that you want to criticize a company that makes a rational decision.
What do you want them to buy instead of Bitcoin?
Right?
What are you promoting instead of Bitcoin?
Right?
You have 200 companies that have decided to buy Bitcoin.
That's like criticizing the 200 companies that adopted electricity.
You're like, well, there's one of them that's better than the other.
OK, that makes electricity bad?
How is it irrational for a company to adopt a new technology
which is better than the previous technology?
No, that's not rational at all.
What I worry about is the companies that may be seeing this as like a cash grab
rather than actually trying to build anything interesting.
OK, but we're not here to promote bad companies, are we?
are we? That's kind of like, okay, well, I invented electricity and some dude that sells,
I don't know, like cardboard cotton candy placards for a billion dollars announces he's
going to buy electricity. I mean, my point is like, should you invest in the cardboard cotton
candy company that sells cotton candy cardboard boxes for a billion dollars? Of course not.
But my problem with your framing is you're saying, I don't know if the market has room for more than a couple of companies to buy Bitcoin.
Look, the market has room for every company on earth to buy Bitcoin.
Right?
The market, and by the way, there's a simple way to think about this.
If you've got a successful business or a healthy business and you're generating cash and you buy Bitcoin, won't you be better?
OK. If you have a business which sometimes makes money, it's a struggling business.
And some years it makes money, some years it doesn't make money, but you have a lot of cash.
Wouldn't you be better to invest the cash in Bitcoin than give it away?
Yes, absolutely.
Wouldn't you be better to invest the cash in Bitcoin than buy treasuries?
OK. So good companies benefit from buying Bitcoin.
And then struggling companies benefit from buying Bitcoin.
Now, if you have a company which makes no money, that's never going to make any money,
that has $100 million in cash, your choice is give the money away.
You've got no company.
Invest the money in Bitcoin.
You've got a company that generates no cash in its operating business, but makes $30 million
a year, growing at 30% a year.
I give you a digital company that is generating $30 million a year, growing 30% a year.
Was that a good decision by the company?
Yeah.
OK.
And so now your issue is, now I have a company which is losing $10 million a year forever.
And I can make $30 million in Bitcoin, growing 30% a year.
That means I start with $20 million, but the business is growing.
Statistically, by the way, if you start with $100 million in Bitcoin and you bolt on $10 million of losses forever,
then the business converges on the same result as a business that doesn't lose anything forever
because eventually you're making a billion dollars a year and you're generating 10 million in losses
and so you've still got a business making a billion a year is that a good idea
okay so what's your problem like like your problem is i i think part of the issue is
people in the bitcoin community can't imagine buying equity or they're like well that's not
as good as buying Bitcoin. Well, that's not actually true. It is as good as buying Bitcoin.
It's actually better because corporations have all sorts of tax advantages and all sorts of
operational advantages. Take the business, which is losing 10 million a year. That business can
generate a billion dollars of capital and turn around and go raise money at 5% risk-free 10 years
out and buy Bitcoin with it, lever it up, and they'll probably outperform Bitcoin.
what's wrong with that nothing's wrong with that i mean i i the only i don't know if it's
better than buying bitcoin in the sense that you don't get to actually hold the bitcoin
um it may outperform it but the point the point is you want to buy bitcoin buy bitcoin yeah but
what but what's with all the hate it's like it's just so dysfunctional like all of the toxicity
in the community that there's 400 million businesses like don't you don't you have a
business, Danny? I do. Okay. With Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Okay. So you want me to sit and do
podcasts talking about how you shouldn't buy Bitcoin and you'll never be as good as some
other Bitcoin treasury company and like heaping scorn on you and then criticizing all your,
if you go, if you find some venture capitalists that wants to give you $10 million and invest in
what Bitcoin did, should I then send emails and nasty grams of them calling them stupid and
criticizing them because they want to invest in you? And like, it's like the point is you have a
business, you have to make a living. Your business is better with Bitcoin. By the way, what about the
venture capitalists? I mean, like the subtext of all this is sort of like some toxicity and hatred
and ignorance of people that invest in businesses for a living. Like the venture capitalist literally
has a job where he has to invest capital in your business. He has to. He's not allowed to buy
Bitcoin. Okay. So, well, you're not going to be the biggest Bitcoin treasury company, Danny,
but the point is the VC needs to invest in someone. He wants to invest in a podcaster.
You can choose to take the money and buy Bitcoin with it, or you can not buy Bitcoin with it.
I'm not sitting hating on you and I'm not hating on him. And I'm not like, I'm not gleefully,
you know disparaging people that buy equities The point is that guy in the business of buying private equity You in the business of creating private equity There are other people in the business
of buying public equity. There are literally tens of trillions of dollars of capital locked up in
the market and they can't buy Bitcoin. They can't invest in a private company. They have to invest
in a public company. And the issue is, should a public company buy Bitcoin so they can invest in
it? Of course they should. Some of them need to buy Japanese companies. Some of them need to buy
Brazilian companies. I have capital. I have to invest in Brazilian companies. So you're a Brazilian
company. You buy Bitcoin with it. You're never going to be the biggest Bitcoin holder in the
United States, but what does that matter? So what happens if you're the 14th company in Brazil that
buys Bitcoin? Well, I mean, the whole point here, the part that people are missing is, and this is
my issue with the Bitcoin community in general, they would rather eat their young and they would
and they would rather criticize other people that buy Bitcoin or support Bitcoin in a different way
than them. Like you're not a self-custody maxi or you don't, you know, you don't do it the way I
should do it. You should put it on like two titanium, 16 titanium plates and bury it under
the dirt in eight continents in order to be a true Bitcoiner. They've got all these criticisms,
but 99% of the world doesn't even know they exist and won't give them a nickel and hates them.
Or constructively, 99% of the world is your enemy, and they don't criticize the 99% of the world as their enemy.
They focus on the 1% of the world that agrees with them on 99% of substantive values.
And so we spend so much time being critical of other Bitcoiners and other Bitcoin companies.
And the truth of the matter is the guy that likes Bitcoin is 99% aligned with you and 1% different.
So I live in the UK or you live in Germany and you speak German and you speak English with an accent.
So I'm going to hate on you because you have an accent.
When you say something in English agreeing with me with an accent, I'm going to spend all my time critiquing your accent.
And I feel like a lot of the debate in the community is that.
And it's just such a waste of time.
It's so non-constructive.
right that i mean the answer is there's 400 million companies some of them are good companies
some of them are bad if you've got a monopoly good for you by the way you don't even need to
buy bitcoin you have a monopoly right they're going to be the last ones to buy bitcoin if you've
got a competitive business you're struggling you buy bitcoin then maybe it's the difference between
success and failure of your business. If you have a business which is a weak business, okay, so
whatever, you sell beverages in Australia and you're not Coca-Cola. Well, that doesn't mean
you're an evil person. That doesn't mean you don't deserve to exist. Maybe Bitcoin is your lifeline.
Like what if your family collectively spends more money than they make and you have no chance or no
hope of making more than you need to spend.
And I give you the chance to invest in Bitcoin.
And that's the difference when your family going bankrupt and being destitute or not.
It's like, I got some podcaster that's going to criticize my family because we're not Apple
computer.
It's like, it's just so offensive that you would criticize someone struggling to make
a living by doing, but by doing some, but by an essence, investing in the same thing
you invest in.
Are you saying I'm criticizing these people?
I'm just saying anyone that's criticizing a Bitcoin company is like piling on to a person that agrees with them on 99% of the fundamentals.
And what you ought to do is applaud their decision.
Right?
They basically decided that freedom and sovereignty and economic integrity and Bitcoin was apex property.
and that's a good thing, and they've joined the movement. So maybe we ought to thank them or at
least support them. The fact that their stock got overvalued by a factor of three or, you know,
so the stock trades up by a factor of 10 and you bought it and then it trades down. And now
your answer is instead of criticizing yourself, you're criticizing them, right? You're a stock
speculator. If you're an equity speculator and you buy stocks that are trading at 57 times revenue
and then it trades down, the fault is not with the company. The fault is with you.
I mean, I totally agree. That's personal responsibility.
So instead of criticizing companies that do rational things, look in the mirror,
hold yourself accountable. The problem is not companies buying Bitcoin. How much room is there?
There's room for every company on earth to buy Bitcoin, Danny.
So, okay, I think maybe I frame that badly because I'm not criticizing these companies.
It's more I'm asking what the market will sustain as of right now for these pure play treasury companies, especially with the fact that like in 2025-
Again, it's an offensive question.
Can I, let me just-
Like, here's the problem with it.
You're the one that's characterizing them as pure play treasury companies.
They're not.
But that's the insult, Danny, is you insult me by characterizing what I am and what I will be for all of eternity.
No, no, I'm not talking about strategy here at all.
No, the point is I'm like just literally insulted that you take that position.
It's an offensive position to take.
Well, I apologize, because I'm really not trying to insult you.
They're operating companies.
Okay, but what, so...
So the point is there's 400 million companies.
They do a lot of different things.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
And so you're taking the position that they do nothing but buy Bitcoin and sell equity to buy the Bitcoin by characterizing them as a pure play?
Okay.
Again, that wasn't my intention.
I'm really not trying to offend you.
Let me say it a different way.
How many companies are there on earth, Danny?
400 million.
Okay.
Well, so how much room is there for companies on earth?
400 million.
Well, then why are you concerned about the fact there's 200?
No, no. The question I'm trying to get to, though, is like with In25, like you launching the preferreds, which I think are a really interesting product. Does that change the playbook for all these other companies? And how do they now compete against you now you have the preferreds as well?
Again, I take issue with your question.
It's an ignorant, insulting, myopic question.
Why do you frame things that way?
We're not competing with each other.
That's like saying, well, you know, like I heard my neighbor bought Bitcoin and I bought Bitcoin.
There's not enough room for both of us to buy Bitcoin.
We're competing with each other.
Now, what's my neighbor's got to buy another crypto asset?
Like we're not competing with each other, Danny.
like that that's that's the ignorant part of the question right that's what i take issue with
what you have if you're a hotel company in japan you're competing with other hotel companies in
japan and the decision to buy bitcoin is just a decision to improve the quality of your company
it's like saying how many companies can have electricity i heard 200 companies have electricity
but there's one company that uses a lot of it.
So do the other companies have to change their strategy?
Dude, you think they had the same strategy?
It's a silly question, and it's a myopic, ignorant, toxic framing of a question.
And the result is you come to some ignorant conclusion.
Okay.
There's room for 400 million companies to buy Bitcoin.
Danny. Do insurance companies compete with my company? I don't sell insurance.
No. Do banks compete with my company? I don't sell bank. I'm not a bank. I don't buy consumer
credit. Do I issue credit cards? No. Do exchanges compete with my company? No. We're not an exchange.
Do companies that create AI compete with my company? No. None of these people compete with
Like, there's a million.
We literally just said there's 400 million companies.
Why do you think that there's only one possible business strategy for a company that holds Bitcoin as a balance sheet?
That's like saying there's only one thing you can do with electricity.
Okay, what's the one thing?
There's more than one thing you can do.
Of course.
It's like, oh, well, we speak English.
Well, there's only one thing you could do if you speak English.
We use dollars.
Bitcoin is just a digital capital asset
You can literally do millions of things with digital capital
Which is why I take offense every time you try to characterize us as competing with each other
You're creating this dog-eat-dog world where everybody competes
We're not competing with each other
Companies that adopted electricity decided they didn't want to rely on donkey carts
and you're sitting here criticizing companies that adopt electricity instead of use donkeys
you know and it's like i just think it's offensive and it's myopic and we ought to be constructive
why don't you applaud them for not using donkey carts and using electricity and then why don't
you think well maybe there's more than one thing i can do with electricity maybe there'll be a world
of hollywood movies and maybe we'll create elevators and maybe we'll create electric cars
and maybe we'll create hair dryers
and maybe we'll create air conditioners with electricity.
You can't imagine anything you could do
with digital capital?
Of course.
Insurance, credit, banking, exchanges,
derivatives, money, money funds.
How about everything on earth that's ever been done
would be done better with credit?
I mean, I'm really not trying to criticize these companies.
I'm just trying to get your perspective on it.
I'm sorry if that was an offensive question.
You're getting my perspective on it,
which is you're wasting your time criticizing companies
that decided they like Bitcoin.
Okay.
If you want to criticize companies, Danny,
why don't you criticize the 99.9% of the companies
that don't like Bitcoin?
Okay.
I mean, isn't that what you should be doing?
That's my point.
It's like this toxicity of eating its own young.
Like, why don't you actually support the people that agree with you on 99% of your ideology instead of criticizing them?
Fair.
Right?
They're actually trying to do the right thing for their shareholders, their families, right?
Their countries, right?
They're doing good things, right?
There's people in Brazil that need to buy equity.
They need someone like Orange BTC.
There's people in Japan.
They need MetaPlanet.
There's people in the UK.
They need SmarterWeb.
There's people in France.
They need Capital B.
Those companies are planting the flag for Bitcoin,
and they're carrying digital capital into the equity capital markets
everywhere in the world, and they're all doing it to different degrees.
And they're struggling.
It's a very competitive market.
like out of the 400 million companies like how many of them have an easy time of it danny oh
very 10 yeah okay so so there's like 10 mega corps have an easy time everybody else is struggling
there's 8 billion people struggling there's 400 million companies that are struggling
like what what's my advice for them buy bitcoin bitcoin's the strategy my issue with your question
is your advice is don't bother because you're not going to be as big a strategy and let's talk about
all their problems and my point is it's so non-constructive it's all souls soul sucking
right right for for us to spend time on negativity they have they have to get up and go to work just
like you do and so my suggestion for your company is focus on bitcoin and if you have capital buy
bitcoin with it and don't obsess over the fact that maybe you don't have as much as another
company or you can't do what another company could do ask yourself what you can do like i got a hundred
ideas for you. They're all good constructive ideas. People either look at the world with a
positive lens. I'm going to embrace new technology and become the best version of myself I can be.
Or they embrace negative ideas. Oh yeah, someone else got there before me and I guess I can't.
So I don't think we should be spending time on negativity. Okay. Let's move on from that then
because I truly wasn't trying to be offensive with that. With all of the companies that are
trading below 1x MNAV. Obviously, strategy went through a period of that in 2022. Do you think
they will easily be able to grow into positive MNAVs again? Or is there like a constant gravity
to one that you have to kind of fight? No, I think that's just a myopic narrative,
right? Companies exist to create value. And so the company is going to be valued based upon
in their operation, what do they do?
Right?
If I have a company in Japan and I can sell credit instruments that yield 6%
and the rest of the credit markets pay 2%, then what's the company worth?
Isn't that the most valuable company in Japan?
Absolutely.
Does anything else matter?
Isn't the question whether or not you can sell credit to pay 6%?
Mm-hmm.
Take the same company in the UK.
if the credit markets are paying you four,
and you're the company in the UK that offers eight,
what's the company worth?
It's worth a lot.
Now, I'm just giving you one strategy,
but okay, well, what about life insurance?
What if I create a Bitcoin-backed life insurance company
in the UK, and I offer life insurance policies
to pay you double every other life insurance company
in the UK?
What's that worth?
How big is the insurance business in the UK?
reasonably big right a big bank that i that i do business with put out a a preferred stock report
and and they published all the preferreds and the and the average preferred stock in the united states
and in our capital market pays six percent and it's illiquid
you know if you're strive and you have a preferred stock that pays 12 and it's liquid what's that
worth a lot so why are we fixated upon one mna like the issue is not one mna the issue is is
what's the company going to do are you going to create the world's greatest insurance
right like the average insurance company is investing your in your insurance proceeds at
five percent or six percent well what if we invested them at thirty percent
that i mean what if i offered you auto insurance and the auto insurance only cost you one half
what if my premiums were half of the normal auto insurance?
What would the auto insurance company be worth?
A lot, right?
So my point really is the companies will be worth whatever they're worth,
whatever they do.
What are they going to do is the question, right?
We have chosen to create digital credit.
You know, how much room is there to create digital credit?
Well, Danny, you know how many companies issue preferred credit?
No idea.
Thousands.
You know how many companies issue corporate credit?
More.
Hundreds of thousands?
Mm-hmm.
Millions?
You think we're going to saturate the market?
Absolutely not.
I think the prefers are really interesting.
But digital credit is just like it's one little thing.
How about digital insurance?
Right?
There's a lot of other things to be done. Digital banking, digital derivatives, digital exchanges.
If you create a derivatives business backed by Bitcoin, you can, in theory, be much better than conventional derivatives.
If you created an exchange backed by Bitcoin, you could be better than normal exchanges.
You can create an insurance company.
How many insurance companies on earth use Bitcoin as the back-end collateral or the capital?
Zero?
None.
How big is the industry?
Ginormous.
Okay.
So let's not wax philosophical about the fact there's too many companies that are experimenting with Bitcoin.
And there's an important legal point to make, right?
You're an operating company.
Your equity is valued not just on what you're currently doing with your capital.
Your equity is valued based upon what you might potentially do.
The fact that I haven't done it doesn't mean that I couldn't do it.
And this goes to this debate about these companies, these digital asset companies.
Are they investment companies?
Are they operating companies?
An investment company, by law, Danny, cannot do anything with their capital other than hold it in trust.
So if you have $10 billion of capital and you're an investment company, your IBID or your FBTC, you literally can do nothing but hold it and wait.
An operating company can underwrite auto insurance with it.
They can sell reinsurance.
They can sell flood or fire insurance with it.
They can loan it out and rehypothecate it and generate yield on it.
They can write digital credit against it.
They can issue corporate bonds against it.
They can issue junk bonds.
They should issue convertible bonds.
They could actually do real estate development with it.
You could do anything conceivable.
You could create a derivatives market.
You can create all sorts of derivative instruments, exchanges, options, contracts, everything imaginable with it.
OK, the things that they could do would be illegal.
You would literally end up in jail or you would end up bankrupt if you tried to do it as a trust company, as an investment company.
But as an operating company, you can do it.
So, you know, some armchair critic on Twitter wants to stare at a company that's got 500 million or a billion of Bitcoin saying, well, they're trading at a discount to NAV or they traded at whatever NAV and they think they know the future.
You don't know the future.
The point is, if I had a billion dollars of Bitcoin in an operating company and the stock was valued at a billion, is that the same as a billion dollars of Bitcoin in an ETF?
No.
Why?
Because the operating company has a billion dollars of capital and unlimited, infinite optionality forever.
And the trust company has zero optionality.
And so here's the big idea for an equity investor.
The management team of the operating company can take decisions that will either increase the billion dollars by a factor of 100 or take decisions to lose it all to take it to zero They both legal Danny They both ethical right One could say that if the operating management team does stupid things
they rehypothecate the Bitcoin and it's lost and it goes to zero,
they've destroyed shareholder value.
But the management team might also do intelligent things
that create shareholder value.
The stock is going to trade based upon the sentiment in the market about whether or not the investors or the marketplace thinks that the management team is going to create shareholder value and dilute shareholder value.
And over the course of a decade, the market's a weighing machine.
And if they did the right thing, the stock is going to be more valuable.
Do you know how long the conventional wisdom was that Amazon was a stupid company doing stupid things that would never work?
I don't know, a decade?
A decade. A decade after it was obvious that Amazon was a good idea, the conventional wisdom
was they were stupid company doing stupid things, destroying shareholder value. You can literally
watch the Amazon stock and you could see the consensus, go pull the logs. So the market may
take a skeptical view. The market's view of Apple was skeptical for five years, 10 years, like it
traded a P to E of eight or 10 or whatever. It's like a device company. And then it flipped.
But so the market might have a sentiment that these companies are poorly run investment
trusts.
But at the end of the day, the destiny, the fate of the company is going to be determined
by the management team's actions.
And they can choose to enter certain industries, and they can choose to enter certain markets.
My company is a US company.
We haven't chosen to enter the banking industry.
We haven't applied for a banking license.
We haven't entered the insurance industry.
We haven't entered into the market to issue securities in the UK or Japan or Brazil.
We choose not to.
We don't need to.
We won't.
But that doesn't mean that those aren't massive opportunities for other companies.
So the answer is, how many opportunities are there?
Well, the real question is, if there's 400 million companies that are currently in the market today,
well, how many digital companies will there be based upon digital capital that could be successful?
I don't know why there can't be 10,000 successful ones.
Right? And they're all different.
I could literally reel off 20 different categories of digital company in the U.S. capital markets,
of which we're not going to be more than one.
And so I think we ought to put on our cheerful,
constructive, optimistic hat here and say,
okay, we've got the world's greatest financial technology.
Is there opportunity for people, for entrepreneurs or corporations to do good?
Yeah, there ought to be 10,000 private startups that are using Bitcoin.
and there ought to be thousands of public companies using Bitcoin.
And the fact that you bought the stock, you know, at the all-time high and it traded down is the same, you know,
it's the same disappointment of the people that forgot that Bitcoin traded at an all-time high 95 days ago.
It's like, Jesus.
It's like, you know, you call yourself an investor.
if you haven't struggled for four years you're not you're not even you know a casual investor
you're just a speculator or a trader right you know and and if you're really building if you're
a business person if you're an industrialist you ought to sign up for a decade 10 years
and you know and if you've been doing something for 10 years and you haven't succeeded after 10
years, it's reasonable to say, maybe I don't have it, or maybe this was not the right idea.
But for these companies, you ought to give them a 10-year runway. And so instead of saying,
well, I notice right now that all they've done is issue some equity or issue some
debt instruments to buy Bitcoin, that doesn't mean that they won't become the greatest insurance
company in the UK, or the greatest bank, or the greatest credit issuer.
Yeah, that's totally fair.
You said a little earlier that you would never be interested,
or you likely wouldn't be interested in becoming a bank.
That is something that a lot of people have speculated about strategy.
We wouldn't.
You wouldn't do that. Why not?
Yeah, because we have a business which, in theory, is almost infinitely scalable.
If you look at the existing business, we have a product, STRC, stretch, digital credit.
Okay, what's the perfect product?
A product that pays you a 10% dividend with a vol of one or two that's publicly traded?
What's the market size for that?
$10 trillion?
Right, there's $100 trillion easy, you know, addressable market for that.
If we were 10% of that treasury credit market, it would be $10 trillion.
So I have a product which has got a total addressable market of $10 trillion.
OK, who wants it?
Everybody wants it.
Who wants a bank account that pays it?
By the way, what if it got to zero vol?
We actually think that our business idea is simple.
Bitcoin is digital capital.
Stretch is digital credit.
If you create something on top of it that strips it to zero vol is digital money.
A bank account that pays you 8%.
You know, people are trying that right now.
There's a number of people that are trying to create digital money.
Is that essentially like a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin at that point?
Yeah.
Yeah, so I create a stablecoin.
Let's say I strip the ball to zero, and it's just that you put in $19,000.22,
and you get out $19,000.22, and while you're waiting, you collect 8%.
Okay, a bank account that pays 8%.
What's every other bank account pay?
3.5% right now in the US dollars, 50 basis points in yen, 100 basis points in euros or 150 at best.
Okay. So a bank account that pays 8% back by digital credit, how do you credit? You blend
in a mixture of credit and currency. By the way, you can actually, you can crank the leverage down
to 80% and you pay 8% or you can crank the leverage up to 1.5 and pay 15%.
percent. Slightly more risk at 1.5 than it is at eight, but people will do both. They'll crank the
leverage up and they'll crank it down. Okay. What's digital money? Digital money is zero vol
with a yield and access of the risk-free rate. Who wants it? Everybody wants it. How big's the
market? If you had a bank, if you had a bank in the UAE that paid 8% on bank deposits,
might you get $10 trillion?
Okay, you could charge 100 basis points, Danny.
Charge 100 basis points on $10 trillion.
That's $100 billion a year.
Okay, the entire gross national product of Abu Dhabi
is $330 billion.
And in that case, every rich person in the world
is going to be sending their money there.
which is the perfect nation-state strategy,
the perfect business strategy,
the perfect banking strategy,
the perfect product strategy.
Okay, if you're UAE, what do you want?
Do you want all the people in the world
or just their money?
I'll give you a choice.
You can have all the people in the world.
No, I don't want a billion people.
You can have all the rich people in the world.
Oh, now I have 20 million people here.
Or you can just have all the money of the rich people in the world.
I just want their money.
Okay.
How do you do it?
Just take a bank, offer a digital money account, pay 8%, keep 100 basis points, buy digital
credit, blend it with some currency equivalents.
Maybe you put on a volatility buffer.
Maybe you don't need a volatility buffer.
Okay.
Now you make 100 basis points.
You slurp up 10 trillion.
Now you've increased your gross national product by 30%.
Slurp up 30%, double the GDP.
Okay, I double the GDP.
How many people does it take?
Oh, 100.
Okay, 100 people making 100 billion a year.
Okay, I give you an idea to make a billion dollars a person a year.
You have a better idea for me?
I don't have a better idea.
Absolutely not.
Okay, so now we're back to the question of why don't I do
something else. Okay. Because I'm giving you the ideal product. Digital credit is the feedstock
to the entire banking system. In fact, if you create digital money, not only do you take all
the bank deposits, you take all the treasury credit, you take all the repos, you take all
the short dated instruments. But if you look at everyone that bought junk bonds, corporate bonds,
mortgage-backed securities, five-year bonds, 10-year bonds, sovereign debt, municipal bonds.
Why did they not just put their money in a money market? The answer is they were reaching for yield
or a tax advantage, right? How big is that? $300 trillion, maybe more. Okay. How much of that
capital would simply go to a bank account that paid, by the way, all that capital blended in
yields 5%, all of it.
And what do you do?
You take on duration risk and you take on credit risk
to get to 5%.
If you don't want that, you're ripped back to 3% or 2%
or whatever the number is.
So I offer a bank and I offer you 7%.
How much of the $300 trillion would go to that?
No duration risk, no credit risk.
All of it.
OK.
Now, here's the issue.
How do you create digital money?
Well, to create digital money, you need to take digital credit, blend it with a little bit of currency so you have a liquidity buffer, maybe put on a reserve on top of it for a volatility buffer.
Then you need to get a regulatory stamp of approval, right?
You need a banking regulator to say you can offer the account or you need a securities regulator to say, OK, you can offer this as an ETF or you can offer this as a private fund or you need a digital assets regulator to say you can offer this as a digital stablecoin.
OK.
So you put the regulatory stamp on it.
You put the buffer on it.
You do some active management for redemption.
You know, people want daily redemptions and they want it to hold stable NAV.
And so we can't necessarily do that.
Like, I can't give you a regulated bank account in the UAE because, you know, Mike, are you going to start a bank in the UAE?
No.
Like, I can't.
Why would I do that, right?
They can do that.
Am I going to start a bank to compete with Morgan Stanley?
well you know you know i think like in 1860 right morgan stanley got started 18 they were
financing the civil war okay right and so the point is why would i want to do why do i want
to compete with jp morgan or morgan stanley i don't want to i don't want to stick to what you're
good at with fab or emirates bank or barclays bank i don't probably i don't need to yeah right
Because if you want to create digital money, you need digital credit, STRC, okay?
How many banks are there in the world?
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
There's 5,000 banks in the US.
Must be tens of thousands of banks.
So there's no shortage of banks with sales forces and good relationships with regulators, right?
There's a bank in Japan that gets along well with, you know, the Japanese regulators.
Do I want to go to Japan and start the world's biggest bank in Japan?
Of course not.
Do I want to start the world's biggest bank in Germany?
Of course not.
Do I want to be Deutsche Bank?
Do I want to be, you know, the biggest bank in Switzerland?
Of course not.
So there's no point in competing with the banking business.
The idea is digital money, high-powered money, high-powered money based on Bitcoin.
That's the idea, not my idea, right?
I mean, it popped up many years ago in the Bitcoin community.
So if you want to create high-powered money, you need to strip the ball and you need to
integrate it into the currency system of the world.
And so I think it's a simple three-step process.
You start with digital capital.
You layer on digital credit.
and then a third party, a bank or a money manager, actively manages it and then puts the regulatory approval on it
and then markets it and brands it to create digital money.
Vanguard can create it.
BlackRock can create it.
Emirates Bank can create it.
Deutsche Bank can create it.
Morgan Stanley can create it.
JP Morgan can create it.
Do you not agree with me that those are all much better brands with much better distribution, with much better platforms?
my company. So a successful business strategy is not compete with everybody and be intentionally
obnoxious. We don't need to topple the United States government. We don't need to topple the
banking system. We don't need to topple the dollar. We don't need to topple the credit market. We don't
need to topple the commercial banks, the investment banks. We don't need to replace any of them. What
we need to do is figure out how to make them successful and make them the best version of
themselves. In this particular case, you take STRC, you take a digital credit instrument,
and you offer it as the universal financial sweetener, as the feedstock. It's diesel or
kerosene. It's like I show up in Saudi Arabia and I got gasoline. What I don't have is service
stations and auto dealerships and highways and auto manufacturers and driver's education schools
and police force and garages. And do I want to create all that? No. I just literally want to
sell tankers worth of gasoline. And I want some local business. It's like, if I should happen to
find someone that already has all that stuff. Why build it? I would like to say, well, you know,
here, I'm going to give you something 10 times better than what you're currently running your
industry on, and then you get to get rich. I mean, that sounds like a good deal.
Now, here's the most important question. If I offer you a digital credit instrument that pays
you, say, right now it's 11% dividend tax deferred, but let's say it's 10% to make the math easy.
I give you 10% dividend income on a digital credit instrument.
How much do you want to buy?
It's like infinite.
Okay, what's the market for that?
The market for that literally is $10, $20, $30 trillion.
Okay, then the question is why wouldn't you buy it?
What's keeping you from buying that?
Like if I'm going to give you something which is 10% yielding and you can build any bank account or any money market fund, private or public, or any stable coin or anything on top of it, okay?
And if the market right now is $300 trillion of credit offering 5% and we're offering 10%, by the way, it's 10% tax deferred.
So it's really 15% blended.
So if we have something which is three times better than the rest of the world,
why wouldn't you buy it?
Tell me.
I mean, I don't know why you won't buy it.
I guess the only reason someone maybe won't buy it
is if they didn't trust the sort of Bitcoin backside of it.
Okay, well, we can rifle through them.
Okay, I wouldn't buy it because I don't believe in,
I think Bitcoin's going to zero tomorrow.
I don't trust Bitcoin.
then I don't buy it because I don't trust the credit of the issuer.
For example, I want to sell you $10 billion of this instrument,
but I've only got $1 billion of Bitcoin to back it.
You see?
Yeah.
If the issuer isn't credit worthy, I wouldn't buy it.
And then the third reason I wouldn't buy it
is because I think the management team is distracted by other things.
And that's a very long-winded answer to your question, why wouldn't I want to be a bank?
And the fourth reason I wouldn't buy it is because the person that's offering it to me wants to compete with me.
So the answer to the question is because you don't want to get distracted.
You want to focus on what you're doing right now.
Laser-like, laser-focused.
Like if you've created the world's greatest product, and if you have a vision for a digital transformation of the monetary system of the world and the banking system of the world and the credit markets of the world, if that vision is digital credit built on digital capital, then why wouldn't you focus on that?
Everything else is a dilutive distraction, right?
Right? Like, you have the world's greatest product. You can either sell a trillion dollars of it, or you can go find the next thing. You understand that your odds of actually succeeding at the first thing go down exponentially if you come up with a second idea.
When you split to three, four ideas, your odds of succeeding fall exponentially.
And so it's not a good idea to get distracted.
It's also, by the way, it's not a good idea to compete with your customer.
if if i'm actually knocking on the door of jp morgan and first bank of abu dhabi and emirates
bank and morgan stanley and city and bank of america and blackrock and vanguard and i'm offering
them digital money it's like like here's
let's talk about sales, Danny.
You're a salesperson and you show up to the customer.
Here's your two pitches.
I've got the best company in the world.
We're the smartest and you should buy our stock and bet on us because we're smart.
That's a pitch.
Or I've got the best product in the world.
you can buy this product it will cut your cost to zero and it'll delight you and you'll you know
it'll be very enjoyable it's like the iphone it's consumer product that's pitch or i have an
industrial product if you buy this you can create robots and be the most valuable company in the
world yourself i'm going to give you a chip and you'll become the most valuable company in the
I have unlimited free thermonuclear reactor in a pocket,
and you can put it into your cars,
and you can create flying hover cars,
and you can become the greatest company on earth
with the greatest power.
on earth and I'll be your vendor or even better I have a product you can put it into your bank
your bank will be the biggest bank in the world and your country will be the most the richest
country in the world and your country and your children's children's children will be rich
forever and you'll be the most powerful company and the most powerful country with the most
prosperous people and you'll create the greatest company because you'll have the greatest product
in the world and I'm just going to be your humble supplier which of the three sales pitches do you
think is the most powerful sales pitch. Easy decision. Yeah, you see? And this is the point
of Bitcoin, which is, I don't show up and say, guess what? I invented something smarter than
what you have, and you're stupid, and I'm smart, and we're going to crush you to death because
you're stupid, and we're better, right? Don't show up with that pitch. Or, you know, you have
this business, you have a bank, but it's a 20th century bank, and it's going to zero. So what you
ought to do is just sell your stock in that bank and buy the stock in my digital bank, which is 21st
century. There's no reason to be confrontational and negative. Why don't you be inclusive and
aspirational? Let everyone else win with you. And that's my view with Bitcoin all the way forward.
Bitcoin is for everybody. Everybody is better with Bitcoin. The government, the corporation,
the people richer than you, people more powerful than you, people more famous than you,
right? People that have politics you disagree with, they can all embrace Bitcoin and they will
all benefit from it and you will benefit from it, right? That's at the base layer. That's digital
capital. With digital credit, you know, we're creating digital credit. Am I worried that
someone else might copy it? No, because if 100 companies copy it and they also issue digital
that will accelerate the transformation of the credit markets and we all win together right
they're actually helping we're helping each other that's a good thing to embrace that and then when
you go to see the customer right the small ideas is we have a great product you should buy our equity
the bigger idea is we have a great product you should buy the product to make your life better
But the greatest idea is we have a digital credit product.
You can actually build it into your financial product, build it into your bank, build it into your future, and you can have the greatest product in the world.
And you can be the greatest company in the world.
And you can be the most powerful nation in the world.
Empower others.
Right?
Empower others by allowing them to be part of your future.
And you can see, if you want Bitcoin, what is hyper-Bitcoinization?
Hyper-Bitcoinization is not all the governments and the banks and the corporations all go away.
Yes, they all have Bitcoin.
Next time you sit in a dentist's chair and you look up and imagine all the governments and all the corporations went away.
And then imagine the guy that manufactures the Novocaine and the drill bit and the x-ray machine also went away.
And then think about how they deal with your toothache.
The point is, the future is not corporations and governments go away and banks go away.
The future is not currencies like the dollar go away.
The future is, we embrace Bitcoin as digital capital.
We rebuild the entire economy with that as the base layer.
then we create products on top of it, whether it's digital insurance or digital credit or
digital banking or digital derivatives. And I am not the expert in digital banking,
digital derivatives, or digital insurance, nor am I going to purport to be. I'm just going to
focus on digital credit. And I'm not even the expert in digital credit because there's 100
flavors of digital credit. I'm just going to focus upon the digital credit that we focused on
and digital treasury credit.
And what I would say is that if you actually take that credit
and then you synchronize it with the dollar and the yen and the euro
and the real and the pound,
you synchronize the digital credit with the currency systems of the world
and you're synchronizing it with the $300 trillion credit market,
then that becomes the base layer for a new type of digital money.
And high-powered money is the yen yielding 6%, the pound yielding 8%, the dollar yielding 8%, the euro yielding whatever it yields.
Whatever the currency frame of reference is, wherever your liabilities are, I'm going to give you that with no currency risk, but with a risk-free rate, ideally, which exceeds the inflation rate of that currency.
Right. If if the dollar is expanding at eight percent and I can give you digital money that yields eight percent tax deferred, then I just gave you a completely stable instrument that lets you keep up with inflation.
And then you don't got to complain that you bought Bitcoin at the all time high 94 days ago and now it's traded down.
Or, you know, you bought whatever stock, some Bitcoin treasury company three months ago when it traded down.
I mean, the truth is when you buy Bitcoin, you're a capital investor.
You've got to have a four-year time horizon.
When you buy equity, you're an equity investor.
You've got to have a four-year time horizon.
And you take equity risk, right?
It's like if you don't want to take risk and you don't want to take duration, you don't want credit risk, you don't want duration risk, you don't want equity risk, you want money.
Who do you want it from?
You want it from a too-big-to-fail bank.
So what is the future?
The brilliant future is the 200 biggest banks in the world offer digital money accounts that pay double what traditional money markets pay.
And 10% or 20% of the money in the world flows into those bank accounts, maybe 30, maybe 40, maybe 50.
Remember what I said, though?
It took 30 years for 75% of the people to agree that electricity made sense.
How long did it take any rational thinker? 30 seconds. It takes 30 seconds for a rational thinker to figure out what it took the world 30 years to 75% agree on.
So if we create digital credit and we wire it and then we create digital money and then we wire it into the banking system of the world, you're going to have delivered a product which is three times better.
Or depending on how valuable is it for you to collect $120,000 a year instead of $40,000 a year?
Is that three times better or is that infinitely better?
Yeah.
Might be infinitely better.
Right. So we'll create that. It'll take them out of time. And what's the risk factor?
The risk factor is distraction of the management team. It's ego. Right. It's always ego, Danny.
It's you have something good and your ego tells you you got to make it better. Right. It's like
if you want to segue into the controversy du jour right now, it's like Bitcoin will fail if it
doesn't have larger block sizes. That was the controversy. Then Bitcoin will fail, and that
gave us the block size. Bitcoin will fail unless it has more functionality, and that gave us tap
root. Bitcoin will fail if it doesn't use less energy, and that gave us the ESG wars. Bitcoin
will fail if a billion people can't self-custody and all of a sudden you need 100-bit proposals to
scale that up. Bitcoin will fail if it doesn't have smart contracts and you need that.
Bitcoin will fail unless we're quantum resistant right now. And it's all of this alarmism and it's
ego. People have these ideas and they want to be very important. And so they want to represent
their ego, and they want to drive dilutive distractions a hundred ways.
And I would say that's how empires fail.
Why is California struggling?
Because you get so rich and so successful that you feel like you can do whatever you want.
Right?
Why is Europe struggling?
It's like after you win, you decide you have to declare universal health care, universal child care, universal this care, universal that care, universal whatever.
Like the idea that in California they're giving reparations to slaves.
No one was ever a slave and people that lived there never had slaves.
And yet somehow we think we can right a wrong that took place somewhere else in the world to other people because we have infinite money.
so i think that every empire collapses because people think they've been successful so now they
can expand right and and that's the most pernicious thing at a protocol level it's the
most pernicious thing at a city when the mayor of the city says hey we're going to give free needles
and free health care and free housing and free whatever and free uber rides and free blah blah
blah, blah. We're going to raise taxes to do it. And then everyone that crates the capital leaves.
And then everyone that doesn't have any that's a liability arrives. And you've swapped out your
productive citizens for nonproductive citizens and the entire economy collapses. Right. And did
it happen in Easter Island? Yeah. I mean, they thought that they could create like large stone
statues. It's like, you know, how to 40 foot high stone statues contribute to the economy of a,
you know, Pacific Island where we need fish to eat, my friend. We need the wood for the canoes
to catch the fish so we don't starve to death. No, we will chop them down so we can create large
stone statues because the gods demand it. It's like what you have is you have a tipped power
structure And that is my way of addressing what destroys companies Danny It the CEO and the management team are successful They like well we succeeded in this so now we can do this and now we can do the next thing And now that we doing this we expanding into this we expanding into this we expanding into this
and we're expanding into that.
Why? Why do we do it? Because we can.
It's a Napoleonic complex.
You know, it's like I got to spread my ideology and my ideas
to the frozen tundra of Russia in the winter,
and I'm going to kill them if they disagree with me,
spreading my ideas to them because I was put on earth to do this. So I think that my advice to
any entrepreneur is focus and check your ego. And the reason I can do it is because I'm 60 years old
and because I was 30 once. I was a 30, 35-year-old successful entrepreneur once. And as soon as I was
successful, I came up with 10 more ideas. And each one of them was ambitious. And I split my
energies and my company's energies 10 different ways. And what you realize is it's very, very
challenging to do one thing well in this world. And you shouldn't get distracted. So
we're not getting distracted, right? We're focused on an idea. It's a big idea. We want to create
digital credit as the base layer for digital money. And if that one idea works, that would
make us the biggest company on earth. And that would make that the most successful product ever.
And so humility dictates that once you come up with a good idea, you might want to focus 100%
of your energy in making that idea successful. And it's cavalier. It's cavalier and irresponsible
to run off and chase after the next 99 ideas
because you're putting at risk the important one.
You're putting at risk.
That's why I'm a conservative defender of the protocol.
I don't like big protocol because if Bitcoin is the idea
and it's already succeeding and it's going from nothing
to $2 trillion to $20 trillion to $200 trillion,
then don't put that at risk, right?
Don't put that at risk until you have overwhelming global consensus that the thing that you're doing is necessary to de-risk it, right?
And if I want to destroy a company, I just walk into the boardroom with 100 good ideas and I have them fund all of them.
If I want to destroy the protocol, I just fund 100-bit proposals with unlimited money, and I get the best engineers, and I fund everything.
And if you want to destroy a city, you fund every possible program.
We're going to clean up the environment, and we're going to give free lunches, and free this, and free that.
You see what happens in Minneapolis.
Like, oh, we've got to give child health care, and it's free, and we've got to do it fast.
and pretty soon you find out that you're funding non-existent children.
They notice there's an explosion of autism and all of these other ADHD diagnoses.
Well, when the government gives you $10,000 a year for every person diagnosed with autism or ADHD,
you will generate a lot more of those diagnoses.
If the government's buying that diagnosis, the free market generates it.
And so if you decide, if you have infinite power or infinite money,
if you're a politician with infinite power and you want to pursue 100 good ideas,
that's what destroys the society.
And if you're a businessman, a CEO, and you have infinite money
and you have 100 good ideas and you presume that's what destroys the company.
Yeah. So it's just staying laser focused. I love it.
Earlier when you were talking about digital money,
recently you've just started stacking dollars as well as Bitcoin.
Is that with an idea of being that liquidity pool for digital money?
Or is that more to try and sort of get rid of some of the nervousness
around investing in the preferreds because of the interest payments?
The reason for creating a USD reserve
is to improve the credit worthiness of the company
in the eyes of the credit investors.
Okay.
Right?
The people that are buying the credit are buying the credit because they think Bitcoin's too volatile.
And they think the equity's too volatile.
You see?
Yeah.
Right?
And so you can do things that are good for a Bitcoin investor.
Someone that wanted, if you're an equity investor, you want more Bitcoin, more volatility.
But if you're a credit investor, you want something which is most creditworthy.
So how do you improve the creditworthiness of the company?
If you want to be the biggest issue of digital credit, well, those investors, they don't really have a strong view on Bitcoin one way or the other, but they don't like volatility.
They don't like uncertainty, right?
And right now, you're creating a credit profile in the eyes of, say, the S&P credit rating agencies or Fitch or Moody's, or in the eyes of a very conservative credit investor.
So, you know, it's complicated for me to assess the statistical risk of being able to generate $800 million of cash over the next 12 months in the equity markets.
but it's not complicated to assess whether or not you have $800 million of cash in the bank if you
have $800 million cash, right? If I said to you, if your life depended on it, like, Danny, I'm going
to put a gun to your head. I'm going to pull the trigger and blow your brains out if you're wrong.
I have $800 million in cash in the bank, and I need to pay a bill on Monday. Or I have the ability
to generate $800 million of cash by selling equity,
it's, you know, there's a lot of equity,
liquidity in the market,
and you have to risk your life.
Which of the two trades would you wait?
Even though I'd probably believe the equity,
you're obviously picking the money.
Yeah.
Yeah, because what we're talking about here is
the whole idea of credit is to strip the volatility
and strip the risk off of the capital.
Right?
If you're a capital investor and you have a 30-year time horizon and you have a million
dollars, you buy a million dollars of Bitcoin, you hold it, you get 30% AR for the rest of
your life.
It's a no-brainer.
If you're a three-year-old and you need $10,000 a month or X thousand dollars a month or else
you starve to death and you're three years old, you would settle for 10%.
You would settle for 10, you know, you don't want 30%.
You would take $10,000 a month or $8,000 a month on a million dollars of capital.
If I said, I'll give you $8,000 a month forever, and I'm going to keep, by the way, I'm going
to keep two-thirds up front, but what I'm really keeping is 90% of the capital gains.
If you do the math over a long period, 90% of the economic benefit goes to the company.
10% goes to the credit investor.
But if your life depended upon having the money,
if you were going to get thrown out of your house
or your marriage was going to fail
and your kids were going to not eat
or you weren't going to pay your medical bill
and you were going to die,
then all of the arguments about theoretically
it's better to accept the volatility.
They go out the window.
You have to accept two things if you're a capital investor.
And by the way, capital investor is Bitcoin holder, not equity investor.
Equity is MSTR holder.
If you're a capital investor, you have to accept volatility and duration.
You're not accepting the equity risk because you're just holding Bitcoin, but you're accepting,
you're basically saying I'm holding it for four years minimum, 10 years ideally, and you're
accepting 35, 45 vol.
But if you're a credit investor, I mean, ideally, people want zero of all.
I mean, the ideal product is I have a million dollars.
I put it into a bank, and it generates $100,000 a year, and I get $8,000 a month, and I get it every month for the rest of my life, tax-deferred ideally.
But whether it's taxable or not, I just want that because that way I can buy an apartment that costs me X thousands and I can pay for health care and I can go to school and I can take a girl out on a date or I can buy furniture, pay electricity.
Right.
As I've said, the world is built on capital, but the world runs on credit.
You know, and so what's the logic of what we're doing?
we're a company. What is the company's business? How are we creating value? The big way we're
creating value is we're creating digital credit. Who's the customer? Not the capital investor,
not the equity investor, right? The capital investor is buying Bitcoin. They're not our
customer. They're our ally. We're allies together. We're on the journey together.
it. The credit investor is buying STRC. They want to trade at $100 and pay them a monthly dividend,
and they want to know that no matter what happens to Bitcoin, no matter what happens to MSTR,
they're just getting that drip, right? If the customer is happy, right? If the credit investor
is happy, then we buy Bitcoin, and that creates amplification for the equity, and then the equity
has value. If the company can sell $10 billion of credit a year, and if we're capturing 90%
of the economic benefit of the credit, okay, I just raised $10 billion. It's going to be
worth $100 billion in 10 years. I just captured 90% of the benefit. I made $90 billion for the
equity, right?
I'm creating shareholder value by selling the credit.
The equity value is the result right That makes sense And so you running the company for the benefit of the creditors
But it turns out that if we run the company for the benefit of the creditors,
then the demand for the credit increases
and the stability of the credit increases, right?
Do you want it to trade with a vol of 1 or a vol of 10 or a vol of 20?
When we didn't have that USD reserve, Bitcoin crashed.
And STRC went from $100 down to $92.
And then everybody chatters like, maybe they can't pay the dividend, right?
And so then we put $2.25 billion of cash on the balance sheet.
And now you're like, well, for the next three years, they're going to pay out of the reserve, even if they can't raise equity capital.
So all of a sudden, that strips the risk.
If you strip the risk, you strip the vol. The volatility of STRC, it spiked to 19 after that crash, and now it's working its way down to like seven. It's been falling, and it should fall down to five or four or three or two or one, right?
So our operation is to strip the vol, and to strip the vol, we have to strip the risk.
And to strip the risk, it means that we have to put some cash on the balance sheet.
And in the near term, that's slightly dilutive to the equity.
Instead of a BTC yield of 27%, you might have a BTC yield of 23%.
Yep.
But at the end of the day-
That's because you did the ATM to do it and obviously didn't buy Bitcoin.
We sell some equity and we buy cash instead of buying dollars.
So it's near term, somewhat dilutive.
But on the other hand, the market was valuing us with a P to E of one.
Like they were giving us a premium of 23% or 25% against a BT yield of 25%.
So the market gives you a P to E of 1.
So the market doesn't believe you can keep doing that anyway.
Okay, so you've got to ask the question, well, if the company never sells any credit again for the next decade, then what's the yield going to be?
Well, the yield's going to zero.
And so the company trades.
If the company doesn't sell credit, then it doesn't matter.
So what you want to do is not try to maximize the BTC yield with an expectation that it's a one-year thing.
What you want to do is create a business model where you can generate a consistent BTC yield for the equity investors for the next decade.
So we'd be better if we generated a 10% yield every year for 10 years, then maybe get a P to E of 10, and then you trade at a premium of 100% to your NAV, you see.
That's better than a BTC yield of 25% with uncertainty about how you're getting there.
Totally.
That makes sense.
And the challenge that some of the Bitcoin treasury companies have is if you're just selling equity, there's an uncertainty about how many years you can continue to generate yield just by selling equity.
which is why you want to look at an operating model, which is some kind of financial instrument
or some model where you generate consistent yields through an operating business, an insurance
business, a banking business, a derivatives business, a financial activity, a credit business,
et cetera. So what we're doing is creating a digital credit vehicle. And you look at the
company going into 2026 and it's, you've got $2.25 billion of cash, you got $60 billion of capital,
of Bitcoin. Okay, you got $62, $63 billion of capital. We should reasonably be able to sell
a dime worth of credit for every dollar of capital. So you have $60 billion of capital,
sell $6 billion of credit a year. That's sustainable in theory in perpetuity, right?
I mean, so you're really building a business where, you know, you look to sell $6 billion
of credit against $60 billion of capital, have the capital appreciate to $100 billion.
The next year, sell $10 billion of credit, have the capital appreciate to $130, $140.
The next year, sell $13 billion of credit. And you're like, you know, what's your cash flow?
$6 billion, $10 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion, $25 billion, $30 billion.
The equity capital markets, they like a business model well understood, predictable.
The credit markets, they like an issuer, highly overcapitalized, overcollateralized,
and oftentimes they like third-party endorsements.
The thing that we're struggling against in the credit markets is the Basel rules currently give zero value to Bitcoin.
So you could have $60 billion, they multiply by zero, and the credit rating agencies think it's worth nothing.
I see.
So getting that zero multiplier to go to 25% or 50% or 100% is a big deal in getting institutional adoption by the traditional credit establishment.
So that's what we need to see in 26.
Yeah, if you're making a list of our regulatory hurdles, it was get the insurance companies to insure us, get the accounting profession to give us fair accounting, right?
Make sure the IRS and the Treasury doesn't unfairly tax us with CAMTI.
Make sure that the indexes don't discriminate against us by not allowing us in indexes because we're digital instead of whatever, right?
Get the banks to agree to bank us and extend credit and get the regulators to allow us to take a company public, which all those things we've overcome.
I think that the last thing to focus upon is get the banking regulators to acknowledge digital assets as assets.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, if someone deems you to be a non-person, say, OK, well, you're going to have 100 million voters and you all get zero votes each.
you don't really have equal participation in the society.
So moving from being non-illegitimate assets
to legitimate assets is a big deal.
And believe it or not,
sometimes it's a committee of like eight people
that decide to legitimize you or not.
So we need to get them on board.
Yeah.
Michael, I know you're short on time.
This has been amazing.
Thank you for having us here.
We're in the library.
I'm going to ask you a question completely on a tangent finish.
Do you have a book that you would recommend anyone to read?
One that's like had a real impact on your life?
It doesn't, obviously not a Bitcoin book, just anything.
I think that if you have copious free time, you know, there are two histories.
Either read the story of civilization, which is Will Durant's history.
And it's like 11 volumes, maybe 12 to 15,000 pages.
start at the beginning, go to the end.
Might take you a few hundred hours.
You can listen to it in audio form or you can read it.
Read it if you can because there's a lot of graphic images in it.
I think that it's a balanced history of the world.
I used to think it's comprehensive and I realized, no,
it's a summary of the history of the world.
But compared to what you studied in school, you probably got the cliff notes and this was just a intellectually responsible summary.
and so I would do that because if you read if you read the history of the world you know
the Asian histories Middle East European histories American histories now you'll have
1,000 examples of civilizations rising and falling maybe 10,000 examples and you'll see
certain themes over and over again, but it will immunize you or inoculate you against falling for,
you know, the latest new idea du jour, you know, the new thing, you know, or faddishness. And I
think that's very helpful. It gives you wisdom. And I think for the Bitcoin community in specific,
I think it's also instructive to read Murray Rothbard's histories, right? Murray Rothbard,
a history of economic thought, right?
Or Conceived in Liberty, all of those volumes.
I think Rothbard wrote pretty comprehensive economic histories.
And he tells you the history of economic intervention, political intervention, monetary intervention.
And it's very helpful to read that because I think people are manipulated by the idea du jour and people are always –
Absolutely.
They're always constructing some bromide or some simplistic idea like, well, this represents this or this is the first time this has happened or this happened for the first time.
And they act like there's some righteous indignation.
Like, for example, 1971, we went off the gold standard.
Well, let me tell you a secret.
We went off the gold standard 10,000 times in the history of the world.
In fact, every single society in Russia, all 200 German principalities, they all went off the gold standard.
The example of currency debasement is as old as we have written history.
You know if you go back and you read Rothbard histories what fascinating is he points out that every 20 years or every 30 years in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1650 through the revolution some politician decided it was a good idea to print money and go fight a war and invade Canada And they would all issue a bunch of credit and then
they would go invade Canada. They would lose, come back. And the entire, then they would default on
their obligations and they had hyperinflation. And that was five times in one colony. And oftentimes
you'll read, people will say, you know, like America decided to invade Canada this one time.
It's like, no, actually. Or this was an example of the first time we debased the currency. Well,
in fact, every state debased the currency and the, you know, the colonial government during
the Revolutionary War. But it had happened 37 times before we even had a colonial government.
And then it happened how many dozens of times afterwards.
And so you see in these histories all these patterns, and they just echo over and over again.
You know, there's a bromide that circulates through the crypto community like, oh, yeah, the Reformation.
You know, that was the separation of church and state, and we're the separation of money and state.
The Reformation was not the separation of church and state.
If you actually study it close enough, what you realize is that Martin Luther was a monk that came up with the idea that maybe the German princes could just keep their money and steal all of the property from the Roman princes.
It's like what it represented was the combination of church with the state of Germany, with the northern German state.
and the German princes realized that if they were going to seize the property that the church held
in Germany, they needed God to endorse it. And so they needed God to speak German. And so they took
a German monk who created a Lutheran faith. They adopted the Lutheran faith. They excommunicated
the Roman Pope. And instead of one third of all the property in Germany being held by the Roman
Catholic Church. It was now held by the German Protestant Church. And instead of 10% of all the
money going as tithes to Rome, the 10% of the money terminated back in Germany. And so it was
literally just the use of a religious mechanism for political power to redirect economic power.
And there was never a separation of church and state. The church has always been aligned with
the state. It turns out that the French Catholic Church terminated with the King of France.
The Spanish Catholic Church terminated with the King of Spain. The Roman Catholic Church terminated
in Rome. There's a Venetian Catholic Church that terminated with the Doge of Venice.
And if you think that somehow the Protestant Reformation was a reformation, then explain how
come the Protestants in Switzerland became Calvinist? Because they wanted to terminate
all the money and all the power in Switzerland. And then the Protestants in Scotland, Presbyterians,
they wanted to terminate the money and the power in Scotland. And then the Protestants in the UK,
Anglicans, they wanted to terminate the money and the power with the King of England. And then you
had the Puritans and the Baptists and the Anabaptists. And you know what Southern Baptists
are? The Southern Baptists formed because there was a civil war and we couldn't very well have all
the money and the power terminate with a northerner. So we needed to split. And so you have
continual examples of a political struggle, which was also an economic struggle.
And people frame things as this is a religious fight. Well, it's a religious fight. I mean,
the whole term barbarian, we kill them because they were barbarians. They engaged in barbaric
activity. Barbarian just means I speak a different language. It's just I'm an other.
Okay, if I want to kill someone, it's convenient for me if they don't speak my language
because I can say that they're barbaric, and barbaric means they're Satan,
worshiping, child-sacrificing, you know, barbarians.
They're not there to defend themselves, and they can't because they don't know what I said
because they don't speak the language I just said it in.
And the joke is the Greeks came up with that idea.
So in essence, it gives you God's permission to murder someone that lives across the river and take their stuff.
And this entire idea, these things that echo through history, it's I'm combining religion with politics, with economics, with money.
And these are all justifications for me to accumulate power, seize power.
if I need to undo the power of a Roman pope,
I very well better create the Anglican church, right?
And say that God spoke directly to me, right?
And that kind of was the basis of the Lutheran idea,
which is God is German, God spoke to me,
and he told good Germans that the Roman Catholic, you know,
papist is not his spokesperson on earth anymore.
so i think when you see that you you see that every one of these things they're not new
1971 wasn't special will durant literally has a line he you know he's talking about a russian czar
16th century and he goes yeah you know the russian czar debased the currency and it all
became worthless and people discovered that the last thing in the world that you want to save is
money or whatever. It's like, and he's talking about something 500 years ago in a culture you've
never heard of. And it was like just the 19th time it had happened in the Russian culture.
So all of these things are echoing, right? And oftentimes, you know, one of the most
interesting insights that comes out of Rothbard's work and Conceived in Liberty is the colonies
before the Revolutionary War were decentralized. And the reason that you had any virtue at all
was because when the governor of New York dictated or when the governor of New York said,
you can't own property and you have no economic rights and you can't operate a business,
people could get in a canoe and cross the river and go to New Jersey or Pennsylvania where they
might have a chance. And when all of the, by the way, all the governors went insane. They were all
insane autocrats, but when all of the governors and all of the colonies had all these autocratic
rules like, oh yeah, it's illegal to bake bread or, you know, it's illegal to make a hat. There's
literally like the friend of the governor is the only guy that can make hats in New York. They had
the most insane communist, authoritarian, socialist rules. When they all went insane, you could just
sort of go west and your competition was a set of neolithic stone age tribes
and then you could do what you want and and um you get to bake bread and make your own hats
and you get to and now here's the big reveal which is we're taught in school that somehow
the Revolutionary War was the call in a standing up against tyranny and that the job wasn't done
until we formed the Constitution and created the United States. But what you really realize is
we probably were at the ideal point when there were just a bunch of colonies and there was no
United States because the United States was a power grab because a bunch of federalists and
centralized businessmen wanted to find a way to annex hundreds of thousands of acres in Ohio,
and they needed a federal government to give them title to the millions of acres west of the
colonies. And so they needed to go to the government. So we created a federal government.
They could actually buy a million acres, and they show up in the million acres and kick off all the
homesteaders and say, we have a title from the federal government of the United States. You owe
us taxes or we own your land. And so all of these political formations, they've always been about
balance of power and property rights and the denial of property rights. And what you think,
what you were taught, you know, that was the separation of church and state, is exactly the
opposite of what literally happened. And what you were taught was, oh, we formed the great nation,
And, you know, to preserve people's rights, it was exactly the opposite of what happened to a lot of people.
A lot of people lost their rights, you know.
And once you understand that, it'll keep you from being a simplistic idealist.
And you realize that there's a continual power struggle in nature, in life, in history, never ending, right?
Like everything in history, it's a continual never-ending power struggle over money, over power, over property.
And if I want to murder half of the nation and steal all their property, generally the best way to do it is say God said it was okay.
And so people go, well, you know, we've been mired in religious wars forever.
Isn't that a tragedy?
We created the religious differences.
to justify the war. And once you understand that the religious differences were inevitable
because they're all part of the power struggle between one party and another party, then I think
it helps you to understand why the world is the way it is and why these power struggles will continue.
All about money and power. Well, it sounds like I've got a couple hundred hours of reading to do
because I was not aware of any of that. But thank you so much, Michael. This has been great.
Hope to do it again at some point, but thank you.
Yeah, anytime.