on one Recent episode of the Galaxy Brains PodcastMichael Saylor made the case that Bitcoin is not a currency and it is best to think of it as money and capital only.
He also shared that Tether (USDT) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) are real digital currencies and unveiled his “evil genius strategy” (his own words) to get the world to adopt US dollar stablecoins as opposed to Bitcoin.
In this take, I’ll quote some of Saylor’s words from the podcast before explaining why many of the points he makes are baseless.
capital, not currency
“It’s not a currency, it’s capital,” Saylor said about halfway through the episode.
“You just have to understand – it’s not a digital currency. This is not a cryptocurrency. This is digital capital. This is crypto capital,” he said.
I searched bitcoin whitepaper To see how many times the word “capital” appeared.
This has not been mentioned even once.
However, in both the title and abstract of the text, Bitcoin is referred to as “electronic cash”. While cash can certainly also be capital, it is not the only capital. To think of Bitcoin merely as capital is to deny some of its most essential properties – like the ability to use it to transact 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 medium of exchange (MOE) are inextricably linked. For more information on this, I would recommend you (and Michael Saylor) to read Breeze CEO Roy Sheinfeld’s article “Bitcoin’s False Dichotomy Between SOV and MOE”.
As the episode progressed, Sellers continued to argue (poorly) why Bitcoin is capital, not a currency.
“There are a lot of maxi’s that are like ‘No, we want this to be a currency.’ We want to be able to pay for our coffee with bitcoin,” he said. “It’s like ‘pay me in gold.’ Pay me with a piece of your professional sports team.
In fact it is not so at all.
Sure, Bitcoin is rare, somewhat like gold, Manhattan real estate, sports teams, or famous paintings, but it has many other properties that make it very different from these other assets.
To illustrate one dimension of that point, I’ll quote my colleague Alex Bergeron:
I invite anyone who thinks Bitcoin is like gold to launch a custodial gold wallet.
I will wait.
– Alex B (@bergealex4) 22 December 2024
And then Saylor quoted – wait for it – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in efforts to clarify his point on Bitcoin by saying that Bitcoin is capital, not currency.
“The reason Bitcoin crossed $100,000 is because Jerome Powell said to the world on stage that Bitcoin doesn’t compete with the dollar, it competes with gold,” he said.
Strangely, Saylor said this without acknowledging that the person who said it is the head of the institution that Bitcoin should theoretically replace.
USDT, not BTC
In the interview, Saylor also stressed that true digital currencies are US dollar stablecoins.
“The cryptocurrency, the digital currency, is Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC),” he said. “It’s a stablecoin, the US dollar – it’s a digital currency.”
Then I started feeling nauseous.
For those who don’t know yet, Bitcoin came into the world after the great financial crisis of 2008, when the US government, in conjunction with the US Federal Reserve, chose to print US dollars. collectively (currency devaluation) was done to bail out failing banks, the burden of which was passed on to both US taxpayers and US dollar holders around the world.
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that was created as an alternative to the US dollar and all other fiat currencies. Trying to convince people that Bitcoin is not like that is fraudulent at best, and deeply manipulative at worst.
But that’s not even the worst thing Saylor said on the episode.
He proposed that banks recovering from the 2008 financial crisis issue their own stable coins, which would help prop up the US debt market.
“They should create a common system for issuing digital currencies backed by U.S. Treasuries,” Saylor said.
“The US should have a framework so that Tether gets transferred to New York City. That’s what you want, isn’t it? And then you should basically have a free-for-all where JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs can issue their own stablecoin,” he said.
No, Michael Saylor, I don’t want that. In fact, this is far from what I want.
I don’t want Tether anywhere near New York City (my hometown) and I don’t want JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to issue US dollar stablecoins that they control, which are essentially the equivalent of a CBDC.
When I think of Goldman Sachs, the first thing that comes to mind is award-winning author Matt Taibbi’s description of the institution. new York Times best seller 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 plastered over the face of humanity, constantly jamming its blood vessels into anything that smells of money.”
Goldman Sachs, like the US Federal Reserve, is an institution that sucks the vitality from humanity. Bitcoin was designed to take power away from such institutions, not strengthen them.
At the end of the episode, Saylor lays out his master plan for Bitcoin and US dollar stablecoins.
Here it is:
“Everyone outside the US would give their left hand to put capital on US bonds. So, my strategy would be – and I really think it’s an evil genius strategy; It’s so good that our enemies will hate us, but even our allies will complain. And America will earn 100 trillion dollars in one go.
Here’s the strategy: You dump the gold, monetize the entire gold network. You buy Bitcoin – 5 million or 6 million Bitcoin – and you earn from the Bitcoin network. All the capital in the world, sitting in Siberian real estate or Chinese natural gas or any other currency derivative held as a long-term store of value – European, African, South American, Asian, they all just dumped their worthless assets. and their idle capital assets and they buy bitcoins. Bitcoin price goes to the moon.
America is a big beneficiary. American companies are big beneficiaries. And while you’re doing that, you normalize and support the digital currency, and you define the digital currency as simply US dollars, backed by US dollar equivalents in a regulated US custodian. Which is audited. what happens next?
$150 billion of stablecoins go to $1 trillion, $2 trillion, $4 trillion, $8 trillion, possibly between $8 and $16 trillion, and you create $10 to $20 trillion of demand for US sovereign debt.
While you are reducing demand a bit due to Bitcoin capital assets increasing, you are adding demand back to support the stablecoin. [The digital U.S. dollar then] CNY replaces Rubble. It replaces every African currency. It replaces every South American currency. It replaces the euro.
If you really believe in the US world reserve currency and US values, then every single currency in the world would actually merge into the US dollar if it were freely available.
At this point, I stopped listening to the episode and projectile vomited all over the New York City subway car I was sitting in.
I did not come into the Bitcoin sphere to help the US run a scheme in which it acquires a large percentage of Bitcoin while screwing the world over its garbage currency, and it saddens me greatly that many people in the Bitcoin sphere We are looking for such a person who will come up with such a collusive plan.
bitcoin is money
Bitcoin is money. It is a type of money that cannot be censored or defamed, whose value has increased spectacularly over the last decade, making it one of the most powerful tools ever created for individuals.
To interpret it as anything less, or to try to convince people that a new iteration of the existing version of money is better than this, is to be deeply misinformed.
While Bitcoin is capital, it is not everything, and please do not let Michael Saylor or anyone else convince you otherwise.
This article is a TakeThe opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
