On a a recent episode of the Galaxy Brains podcastMichael Saylor made the case that bitcoin is not money and that it is better to think of it as capital and capital only.
He also shared that Tether (USDT) and Circle's USD Coin (USDC) are the real digital currencies and revealed his “evil generation strategy” (his own words) to make the world acceptance of stablecoins of the US dollar compared to bitcoin.
In this TakeI will quote some of Saylor's own words from the podcast before I break down why many of the points he made are off base.
Capital, Not Money
“It's not a currency, it's a capital,” Saylor said about halfway through the program.
“You just have to deal with it – it's not a digital currency. It is not a cryptocurrency. It is a digital capital. It's crypto capital,” he said.
I searched the Bitcoin white paper to see how many times the word “capital” appeared.
It is not mentioned once.
However, in the title and summary of the text, bitcoin is referred to as “electronic money.” Although money may indeed be capital, it is not just capital. To think of bitcoin only as capital is to deny some of its most essential features – such as the ability to use it to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world without permission.
To reject bitcoin as a currency is to reject a large part of its value proposition. Bitcoin's roles as a Store of Value (SoV) and a Medium of Exchange (MoE) are closely related. For more on this, I would advise you (and Michael Saylor) to read Breez Roy Sheinfeld's piece “Bitcoin's False Dichotomy Between SoV and MoE”.
As the episode progressed Saylor continued (badly) to make the case for why bitcoin is capital and not money.
“There's a lot of maxis that are like 'No, we want it to be a currency. We want to be able to pay for coffee with our bitcoin. Pay me in bitcoin,'” he said. “It's like 'Pay me in gold.' I pay in a building. Pay me with a slice of your professional sports team. Pay me with Picasso.'”
Of course it's not like that at all.
Yes, bitcoin is scarce, something like gold, Manhattan buildings, sports teams or famous pictures, but it has several other characteristics that make it far different from one of these other assets.
To illustrate some of that point, I'll quote my colleague Alex Bergeron:
I invite anyone who thinks Bitcoin is like gold to launch a reserved gold wallet.
i will stay
– Alex B (@bergealex4) December 22, 2024
And then Saylor said – wait for it – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell took on bitcoin in an effort to drive home his point that bitcoin is capital, not money.
“The reason bitcoin rallied past $100,000 is because Jerome Powell is on stage saying to the world, bitcoin doesn't compete with the dollar, it competes with gold,” said e.
Oddly enough, Saylor said this without acknowledging that he is the one who said this is the head of the institution that should theoretically replace Bitcoin.
USDT, Not BTC
In the interview, Saylor also drove home the point that US dollar stablecoins are the true digital currencies.
“The digital currency, the digital currency, is Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC),” he said. “A stablecoin is the US dollar – that's the digital currency.”
This is when I started to get nauseous.
For those who don't know this yet, Bitcoin came into the world after the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, when the US government in conjunction with the US Federal Reserve chose to print US dollars . A lot (debase the currency) to bail out failing banks, and that burden was placed on both US taxpayers and US dollar holders around the world.
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency created as an alternative to the US dollar and all other fiat currencies. Trying to convince people that this is not bitcoin is disingenuous at best, very manipulative at worst.
But this isn't even the worst thing Saylor had to say on the show.
He went on to suggest that the banks that bailed out in the 2008 financial crisis issue their own stablecoins, which would help prop up the US debt market.
“They should just create a standard regime to issue digital currency backed by US treasuries,” Saylor said.
“The US should have a framework for Tether to move to New York City. That's what you want, right? And then you should have a free-for-all where JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs can issue their own stable,” he said.
No, Michael Saylor, that's not what I want. In fact, it is very far from what I want.
I don't want Tether anywhere near New York City (my hometown) and I don't want JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to release the US dollar stablecoins they hold control, essentially the same as CBDCs.
When I think of Goldman Sachs, the first thing that comes to mind is acclaimed writer Matt Taibbi's description of the institution from his insider. New York Times salesman Griftopia.
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere,” Taibbi said in the book. “The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, constantly rubbing its blood funnel to anything that smells like money.”
Goldman Sachs, much like the US Federal Reserve, is an institution that draws on the life force of humanity. Bitcoin was designed to take power away from such institutions, not strengthen them.
Towards the end of the episode, Saylor laid out his master plan for bitcoins and US dollar stablecoins.
Here it is:
“Everybody outside the US would give their left arm to be capitalized on US bonds. So, my strategy would be – and I really think it's a bad strategy; it is so good that our enemies should hate us, but that our friends should also complain. And the US would make $100 trillion in a heartbeat.
Here's the strategy: You dump gold, demonetize the entire gold network. You buy bitcoin – 5 million or 6 million bitcoin – and you make money on the bitcoin network. All the capital of the world, sitting in Siberian real estate or Chinese natural gas or every other currency product held as a long-term store of value – Europeans, Africans, South Americans, Asians , they are all just throwing their crappy possessions and possessions. crappy capital fund and they buy bitcoin. The price of bitcoin is going to the moon.
The US is the big winner. The big advantage is US companies. And while you're doing that, you're normalizing and backing a digital currency, and you're just defining a digital currency as a US dollar backed by a US dollar in a regulated custodian the US that is studied. What happens now?
$150 billion of stablecoins goes to $1 trillion, $2 trillion, $4 trillion, $8 trillion, maybe somewhere between $8 and $16 trillion, and you create $10 to $20 trillion of demand for US sovereign debt.
While you are removing some of the demand because the capital asset of bitcoin is growing, you are adding to the demand to restore the stable. (The US digital dollar then) instead of the CNY, the Rubble. It replaces all African currencies. It replaces all currencies in South America. It replaces the euro.
If you really believe in the US world reserve currency and US values, all the currencies in the world will simply join the US dollar if it were freely available. “
At this point, I stopped listening to the program and the project was broadcast throughout the New York City subway car I was sitting in.
I didn't come into the Bitcoin space to help the US run a scheme where it gets a huge percentage of the bitcoin while hooking the world on its junk money, and it is really worries me that someone who is a lot in the Bitcoin space looks up to come up with such an exciting plan.
Bitcoin is money
Bitcoin is money. It is a form of currency that cannot be banned or put down that has increased in value significantly over the past ten years, making it one of, if not the most powerful tool in it was always created for individuals.
It is a crime to think of it as anything less, or to try to convince people that there is a new version of money that is more important than it, very unconscionably.
Although bitcoin is capital, it is not, and please don't let Michael Saylor or anyone else convince you otherwise.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
