Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Is Not Currency – But Still Plans To HODL For 100 Years
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor – whose company now owns 205,000 Bitcoin (BTC) – says people should buy and HODL their coins 100 years.
“I would encourage people to think of it as digital property – a billion-dollar building in cyberspace,” Michael Saylor told CNBC in an interview on Monday. “Hold it for 100 years.”
More Bitcoin Bought by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy
Earlier that morning, Saylor announced yet another seismic Bitcoin purchase of $800 million at an average price of $68,377 per coin.
The new purchase was funded using proceeds from a recently announced $700 million convertible note offering, on which the firm is paying a meager 0.625% interest, and is due for repayment in 2030.
His company is now the world’s largest corporate holder of BTC, and nearly holds 1% of the entire BTC supply that will ever exist. His conviction to buy more not only comes from his core beliefs as a Bitcoin maximalist, but also the premise that BTC isn’t meant to be sold – or spent – at all.
“People refer to it as ‘digital currency,’ and that’s an unfortunate historical artifact,” Saylor said, likening the asset to valuable real estate property. “The compelling use case is capital preservation for everyone in the world.”
#Bitcoin is Digital Property. It is superior to other investments such as Gold, Equity, or Real Estate because it is digital, available, global, ethical, & useful to millions of companies and billions of people. pic.twitter.com/738dblB0Zt
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) March 11, 2024
The executive noted that Bitcoin’s total addressable market as a store of value is a whopping $100 trillion, compared to the $1 trillion market for a desirable medium of exchange. Bitcoin’s market cap today is still under $1.5 trillion and slightly over that of silver, leaving ample room for growth.
Michael Saylor Says Don’t Call Bitcoin A Currency
Meanwhile, the asset’s use case as property is far less “controversial” or troubling with regulators than its use as a medium of exchange.
Indeed, many of Bitcoin’s loudest critics, including Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, and Gary Gensler, consider money laundering one of Bitcoin’s primary transactional use cases, while much political focus around crypto surrounds the regulation of stablecoins, exchanges, and other facilitators of payments and trade.
“It doesn’t have to be a currency,” Michael Saylor said. “Nobody’s trying to buy a cup of coffee with a fraction of their building on Fifth Avenue.”
The billionaire added that Bitcoin will “eat gold” – whose monetary properties are inferior to Bitcoin, yet whose market cap is still ten times the size. Bitcoin spot ETFs, which first launched in the United States two months ago, are now over half the size of all gold ETFs.
“It’s competing with risk assets as a long-term hold, and it’s competing with you buying an Airbnb as a retirement income source if you’re a middle-class person,” Saylor concluded.
