$BTC: Michael Saylor on “Bitcoin Mining and the Environment”
On Wednesday (September 14), Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR ), decided to address some of the “misinformation and propaganda” surrounding the impact of Bitcoin mining on the environment.
It’s worth remembering that on August 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins for a total purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”
Saylor said at the time:
“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe create long-term risks to our financial program – risks that should be proactively managed.“
Since then, MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its former CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on June 29, 2022, means the firm now holds around 129,699 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,664 per bitcoin.”
On August 2, 2022, MicroStrategy released its “Q2 2022 Financial Results”. The company’s press release on its latest quarterly report announced that “starting August 8, 2022, Michael Saylor will assume the new role of executive chairman and Phong Le, the company’s president, will also serve as the company’s new CEO and as a member of the board.” It also mentioned that “Mr. Saylor will remain chairman and CEO of the company.”
The press release went on to say that “as Executive Chairman, Mr. Saylor will focus primarily on innovation and long-term corporate strategy, while continuing to provide oversight of the Company’s bitcoin acquisition strategy as Chair of the Board’s Investment Committee.”
Yesterday, in a memo addressed to “Journalists, investors, regulators and anyone else interested in Bitcoin and the environment,” Saylor shared “some high-level thoughts on Bitcoin Mining & the Environment.”
Saylor pointed out to critics of Bitcoin’s high energy consumption that:
“Bitcoin runs on the beach, excess energy, generated at the edge of the grid, in places where there is no other demand, at times when no one else needs the electricity… Bitcoin mining is the most efficient, cleanest industrial use of electricity, and is improving energy efficiency to the fastest speed across all major industries… About $4-5 billion in electricity is used to power and secure a network worth $420 billion as of today, settling $12 billion per day (4 trillion dollars per year)…
“The only proven technique for creating a digital commodity is Proof of Work (bitcoin mining) deployed in a fair, equitable manner (ie no pre-mining, no ICO, no controlling foundation, no primary software development team, no series of forced hard fork upgrades that significantly change the monetary protocol)… 99.92% of carbon emissions in the world are due to industrial use of energy other than bitcoin mining… There is a growing awareness that Bitcoin is quite beneficial for the environment because it can be used for to monetize stranded natural gas or methane gas energy sources… Bitcoin maximalists believe that Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment for 8 billion people around the world.“
On September 4, CoinDesk reported that Saylor had spoken (via video call) on Saturday (September 3) to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, and had this to say about what his company is doing with the Lightning Network:
“MicroStrategy has some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications for Lightning: Enterprise Lightning Wallet, Enterprise Lightning Servers, Enterprise Authentication.“
He also explained why he believes Lightning has a great future:
“The advantage of Lightning is not only that you can scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or get the transaction costs to almost nothing, but also the ethos of bitcoin is to tread very carefully and not move quickly on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning you can you move much more aggressively developing functionality and taking more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer.“
