Michael Saylor is at it again!
He's ruffling more than a few feathers in the industry by essentially implying that there isn't a real need for self custody anymore. This off the heels of making claims about 5% "risk-free" yields loaning Bitcoin to banks... well needless to say people are starting to get pissed off.
Saylor makes a lot of great points.
Again I maintain the claim that Saylor has split personalities. There's the CEO businessman Saylor and the degen maximalist. The businessman has been making more appearances and it's starting to make old schoolers more than a little nervous.
Does centralized stake of institutional custodianship increase the risk of government seizure?
No I think it's the opposite, I think when the Bitcoin is held by a bunch of crypto anarchists who aren't regulated entities or acknowledge government/taxes/reporting-requirements, that increases the risk of seizure.
While this may not actually be true it is still a good point and wise exercise to engage in when it comes to adversarial thinking. A topic like this has a lot of nuance, and the way in which the question was framed was in direct reference to Executive Order 6102 and the confiscation of gold back in the World War 2 era.
Given this frame of reference the answer is somewhat appropriate. It's harder for the government to justify the mass seizure of an asset from a regulated institution that's following all the rules. This has nothing to do with individual seizures, but of course this is how crypto Xitter likes to frame it as if we are talking about a completely different topic.
Obviously your PERSONAL Bitcoin is easier to take when it sits within the coffers of an institution and is directly linked to your "slave name" (aka legal name and social security number). That absolutely is not what's being discussed here but this is how everyone in crypto is willfully getting it wrong just to make the same old point we've been making for over a decade.
Not your keys not your crypto.
How do you do fellow degens?
If you consider the Great Depression people thought their gold was safe until [Executive Order 6102]
People say that but mostly it's paranoid crypto anarchists that say that. It's a myth and a trope. First of all they didn't really seize the gold... people voluntarily turned in the gold. They did not [use lethal force] to take the gold. That NEVER happened.
Again, Saylor is correct.
This is a point I've made myself many times over:
Is the United states on the Bitcoin standard?
Maybe we will be soon! :D
But the point is we aren't.
It's totally not a reasonable comparison.
I have said this many times in my comments.
The fear of Executive Order 6102 is a complete farce and blown way out of proportion. Not only are we not on the Bitcoin Standard (fiat printed using Bitcoin reserves) but citizens willingly gave up their gold when it happened in exchange for something of "equal" value. This is confirmed by AI... for whatever that's worth.
It's very obvious that Saylor is completely in the right with this assessment. This is how plenty of rational educated people would look at the situation. Two very big factors make Bitcoin absolutely nothing like gold within this context... and we haven't even begun to explore the digital borderless nature of it that really gums up the works when it comes to confiscation.
Bipolar Manic Saylor is the best.
So people are going to post videos like this be like, "See! Look at what a hypocrite he is!" Yeah, that's not what's going on here. Saylor is a guy that knows his audience and is constantly refactoring and refining his worldview. He's willing to take both sides of an argument without question. Being able to debate both sides of an argument doesn't make you some dipshit bad actor by default. I do it all the time. It's something anyone would do if they want to truly understand a topic rather than just parroting tired rhetoric over and over again like 99% of everyone else.
LoL... degens don't care.
Yeah my feed was pretty lit today I'll give you that.
"Trusting a single company"? What?
What's the single company here? Everyone knows that MSTR uses Coinbase for custody. That's two totally separate companies. I think the issue we are having here is that many assume what happened to MT GOX and FTX could happen to Coinbase. Yeah well... it can't. Coinbase institutional custodianship is a maze of hierarchies and multisig. They can't just "get hacked" and lose all their BTC. Get real.
Even if they could there are more custodians coming online to provide these same services. Soon enough Coinbase won't be the only game in town. And it's actually illegal for some of these bigger agents to hold their own BTC due to the severe consequences and security concerns when it comes to banking. You gotta license for that Bitcoin, brother?
Yes, this is also absolutely correct.
But the question had nothing to do with peasants trusting the government. It was a macro discussion about the Bitcoin network as a whole. It was about institutions trusting the government. And why wouldn't the institutions that control the government not be a little more trusting of it? This is an executive of a company that's about to be listed on index funds... like of course this is the answer he's going to give because duh. This is why I thought it was comical that everyone put Saylor on the pedestal to begin with back in 2021.
There is a certain amount of decentralization within centralization.
It's all a spectrum. If Amazon.com allowed me to open a Bitcoin account I'd be willing to send several thousand dollars to them and spend directly from that account. Why? Because if Amazon becomes compromised I'm only out a couple thousand dollars, which is not an amount I'm personally going to cry about. Again, it's all relative.
Same thing goes for any other place that I shop at. I'd send $1000 worth of BTC to Target if that option existed. If I hold $1000 worth of crypto across 10 distinct corporations that's actually a pretty decentralized and safe spread when it comes to illegal theft. At that point it's the legal theft/confiscation that needs to be worried about. Begging questions like: am I allowed to make an anonymous account? Why wouldn't I be allowed? Is the government going to start forcing every business under the sun to do KYC because crypto makes people hard to track? So much to unpack there so I won't.
Hm... that's interesting.
At the end of the dialog Saylor tries to make the point that "tricking" people into not trusting the banks or the institutions or the government is often accompanied by a salesman trying to sell a product like a gun or a hardware wallet. Clearly this was his weakest argument and I thought it was weird that he was pushing this angle so hard. We all tell everyone to self-custody their assets and we aren't selling anything. It's just flat out incorrect.
I think Simon Dixon is onto something here in that Saylor is projecting his own intent with this statement. He is the one that will soon be selling some kind of yield product with BTC, which circles back into the previous statements he made recently that pissed everyone off regarding letting a bank borrow your BTC for 5% yield.
skateboarding on the sidewalks and listening to loud musics.
Conclusion
Is Michael Saylor a dirty FED? Honestly I'm surprised he's even willing to say stuff like this for fear of all these Bitcoin maxis pulling out of the stonk... but then again that could be exactly the reason he's saying this stuff (so that bigger players feel more comfortable bidding in size and annihilating all the shorts in play at the moment).
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what Saylor says... it matters what he actually does, which seems to be the main point that everyone is missing. Doing these thought experiments that might be wrong is completely harmless at the moment, but the crypto mob is turning on Saylor quickly. Maybe that's a good thing.
Never meet your heroes.
So many thoughts, but the main one is...no matter what anyone says the man is betting big on this one and puts his money where his mouth is. I do respect that.
And yes he is mostly correct in the things he says if one looks at the nuanced contexts.
And lastly, if one is worried that the whole framework is going to fall apart. then gold, BTC, dollars, etc. are not the things that are gonna save you. 😜
wow even if the gov itself was speaking it wouldn't defend that position that strong, why don't they jut do that with their CBDCs when they make them, when satoshi made btc & made the whitepaper he/she/they didn't write that your btc should be held by some mega corporations & banks to keep the BTCs safe, the one/ones who invented btc has/have much more right to say how it should be used & stored, maybe saylor should 1st make his own crypto then he can make it only stored by banks & corporations if like that that much. he argue that all the others just want to sell you something & himself want to sell yield for your BTCs which make the entire argument totally useless also his argument that people with their free well chose to give their gold "that through history stored value" to the gov is funny & none sense, also arguing that we are not on bitcoin standard is useless because it make you think that gov can only make executive orders such as 6102 for the gold when it was the "standard" so since we are no more on gold standard can't the gov at war times or great recessions remake the same 6102 executive order for gold ? well, it can & not just gold but everything with a true & a high value like diamonds for example & no need for them to be the "standard" to get the same executive order. didn't read about Executive Order 6102 in details before & just did so thanks for mentioning it, finally the old wise men who once said "not your keys not your crypto" said it for a reason "certainly one of which is to keep them away from the greedy ones". a great post well done.
That's the problem with a permissionless system.
Nobody gets to tell anyone what to do.
This is what we signed up for.
People have to figure it out on their own.
Many of them learn the hard way by losing everything during their first bear market.
This is the way.
Perhaps, at this time, they dont matter. MSTR, like other stocks, are more dependent upon institutions than retail.
As for BTC, with institutions like Blackrock buying a ton (on behalf of clients), maybe the average buyer doesn't matter either. Institutions are starting to take over which means they move the market.
Saylor will be well aware if we are at this point.
Its been pretty fun with Saylor recently. It does look as though we are building up to some sort of Bitcoin Bank with MicroStrategy and he is laying the groundwork.
Your going to laugh, but I always get Saylor and Cuban mixed up. Not because they even closely look the same. But they are both rich guys who are big on crypto. I think I have it sorted now :)
Wow that is a weird one.
I used to conflate Ryan Reynolds with Ryan Gosling.
But I've finally figured out that I'm team Gosling.
Haha, that is funny. I might have expected all the Chris's, but not Ryan!
Saylor is trying to play smart in the middle. You know he now has a product to sell. He's making all possible signals to please both ends, we know the aim: do profitable business.
#Legend
There is so much here to unpack.
I think this statement actually foreshadows all that is to come.
Micheal Saylor is many things, to many people, but like Elon Musk he now thinks out loud, in public...
And well it's disturbing... unless you realize that we all think in contradictory terms, or statements, as we think through concepts in our mind.
We look at the true statements, the false statements, the unclear statements and we gather facts and data to make those determinations.
Then we discus how one statement holds up to thoughtful discussion versus how other statements fall apart under similar circumstances.
Quite Frankly I think Both Elon Musk and Micjael Saylor have become public thinking entities, who do a lot of their thinking in the form of public discourse.
If you think about it, public discourse is how the original Greek Government we swear were the first democracies , use to operate.
People make statements, and then discuss the various Pros and Cons of these statements or positions.
I think that you are kind of pointing this out, perhaps indirectly, that we now live in a time when men to rich to care what people think, now debate the merits of controversial topics on Twitter.
They come across as confused and their thoughts seem to be all over the place on an issue.
In reality I think all people think in a similar, but perhaps less diverse and less public fashion.
Elon Musk said "My mind is a storm"
I think all minds are a storm. I talk to adolescent males and females for a living, and believe me, their minds are a storm of rational and irrational statements.
LOL
And , if, I understand your points, there were many, many things Saylor says, which are true, technically or clearly correct, in a historically factual manner.
.. and what he says and espouses is heavily influeneced, colored or defined by WHO he really is...
... a man who made a fortune in the TradFi Corporate Sytem, with tools few of us understand or have access to...
... so we must view his statements and pronouncements from his point of view, but more important, his point of functionality, or access to tools, which make his statements, make perfect sense
... but from the viewpoint or point of functionality of others, they may make no sense at all...
... and this is not because Saylors crazy, it's because he is Saylor, and we are not.
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