Michael Saylor: “Bitcoin must be understood as something outside of this crypto industry”
On Tuesday (Nov. 22, 2022), Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of software company MicroStrategy Inc. (Nasdaq: MSTR), made comments suggesting that he believes Bitcoin should be judged on its own and not considered a synonym. for crypto.
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 September 20, 2022, means the firm now holds around 130,000 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,639 per bitcoin.”
FTX Trading Ltd. (doing business as “FTX.com”) issued the following press release on November 11, 2022:
The following video from the Wall Street Journal nicely summarizes how FTX went bankrupt:
On November 11, 2022, Saylor had this to say – during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” – about what the ripple effects of the collapse of FTX would be:
“I think this week highlights the benefits of Bitcoin as much as it exposes the fragility of the crypto ecosystem. Bitcoin is a commodity that you can self-storage without an issuer. The vast majority of all crypto tokens out there are unregistered securities trading on unregulated exchanges, and they are quite centralized.
“And so what could go wrong? Well, we saw what could go wrong if a centralized token trade on an unregistered exchange explodes this week. I believe that Bitcoiners have been predicting this for a long time. Speaking for all bitcoiners, we feel we are trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with crypto and we want out…
“I think the industry needs to grow up and the regulators come into this space. And what the world wants is digital assets and digital goods and digital securities, but there is no way to register a digital security. There is no clear guideline, a road map for designating a digital item. The world wants a trillion dollars of digital currency in the form of USD stablecoin…
“And so I think the regulatory intervention of late has been negative, like enforcement, but the market is waiting for the regulators to say ‘this is how you register a digital currency’, this is how you register a digital security or a digital commodity’…
“And instead of saying all crypto exchanges should be registered, we need to get the crypto exchanges registered because the future of the industry is registered digital assets traded on regulated exchanges where everyone has the investor protection they need and investors understand the difference between Bitcoin and a stablecoin and a security token.. .
“I think it definitely comes down to the strength in the hand of the regulators. It’s going to accelerate their intervention… And it’s regressive regulation, which is saying “you can’t really do anything”, and it’s going to pull the industry together… but it’s progressive regulation, which is saying “this is a way to register a digital security, a digital currency, a digital token and your digital exchange.
“If it’s progressive regulation, then I think you won’t see 20,000 tokens, you’ll see dozens, but there will be properly registered tokens. The industry is going to grow much faster. And ultimately we’re moving from the entrepreneurial stage where this was a Wild West offshore where everything goes to an institutional digital asset stage … and we’re all going to grow up and the world is going to benefit.“
Anyway, yesterday Saylor responded to a comment (by Joshua Hendrickson, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi) published on November 21, 2022 on the NBC News website about how Bitcoin could get a bad name as a result of the bragging of bad actors in the crypto industry . That article said:
“What this story reveals is that what is commonly known as crypto is distinctly different from both the cypherpunk vision that motivated the creation of Bitcoin and from developments in and around Bitcoin itself over the past decade. While Bitcoin was created to be a censorship-resistant, trustless digital form of money, crypto has become a space dominated by get-rich-quick schemes. Whatever this crypto industry is, most Bitcoin and Bitcoiners want no part of it.“
This prompted the former MicroStrategy CEO to send the following tweet to his 2.8 million followers:
Image credit
Featured image via Pixabay
