On a current episode of the Galaxy Brains podcast, Michael Saylor made the case that bitcoin isn’t a foreign money and that it’s greatest to consider it as capital and capital solely.
He additionally shared that Tether (USDT) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) are the true digital currencies and unveiled his “evil genius strategy” (his personal phrases) to get the world to undertake the U.S. greenback stablecoins versus bitcoin.
On this Take, I’ll cite a few of Saylor’s personal phrases from the podcast earlier than breaking down why most of the factors he made are off base.
Capital, Not Forex
“It’s not a currency, it’s capital,” mentioned Saylor about midway via the episode.
“You just have to come to grips with it — it is not digital currency. It is not cryptocurrency. It is digital capital. It is crypto capital,” he added.
I searched the Bitcoin Whitepaper to see what number of occasions the phrase “capital” confirmed up.
It isn’t talked about as soon as.
Nevertheless, in each the title and summary of the textual content, bitcoin is known as “electronic cash.” Whereas money can in fact even be capital, it’s not solely capital. To think about bitcoin solely as capital is to disclaim sure of its most important properties — like the flexibility to make use of it to transact with anybody anyplace on the earth permissionlessly.
To disclaim bitcoin as a foreign money is to disclaim a big a part of its worth proposition. Bitcoin’s roles as a Retailer of Worth (SoV) and a Medium of Alternate (MoE) are inextricably linked. For extra on this, I’d advise you (and Michael Saylor) to learn Breez CEO Roy Sheinfeld’s piece “Bitcoin’s False Dichotomy between SoV and MoE”.
Because the episode proceeded Saylor continued to (poorly) make the case for why bitcoin is capital and never foreign money.
“There are a lot of maxis who 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 mentioned. “It’s like ‘Pay me in gold. Pay me in a building. Pay me with a slice of your professional sports team. Pay me with a Picasso.’”
It’s really not like that in any respect.
Positive, bitcoin is scarce, considerably like gold, Manhattan actual property, sports activities groups or well-known work, however it has a variety of different properties that make it far completely different from any of those different belongings.
As an example a dimension of that time, I’ll cite my colleague Alex Bergeron:
I invite anybody who thinks Bitcoin is like gold to launch a custodial gold pockets.
I’ll wait.
— Alex B (@bergealex4) December 22, 2024
After which Saylor cited — look forward to it — Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s tackle bitcoin in efforts to drive residence his level that bitcoin is capital, not foreign money.
“The reason bitcoin rallied past $100,000 is because Jerome Powell on stage said to the world, bitcoin does not compete with the dollar, it competes with gold,” he mentioned.
Oddly sufficient, Saylor mentioned this with out acknowledging that the person who mentioned that is the pinnacle of the establishment that Bitcoin ought to theoretically exchange.
USDT, Not BTC
Within the interview, Saylor additionally drove residence the purpose that the true digital currencies are U.S. greenback stablecoins.
“The cryptocurrency, the digital currency, is Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC),” he mentioned. “It’s a stablecoin U.S. dollar — that’s the digital currency.”
That is after I began to get nauseous.
For many who don’t but know this, Bitcoin got here into the world within the wake of the Nice Monetary Disaster of 2008, when the U.S. authorities along with the U.S. Federal Reserve opted to print U.S. {dollars} en masse (debase the foreign money) to bail out failing banks, the burden of which was laid each on the U.S. taxpayers and U.S. greenback holders worldwide.
Bitcoin is a decentralized cash that was created as a substitute for the U.S. greenback and all different fiat currencies. Attempting to persuade those that bitcoin shouldn’t be that is disingenuous at greatest, deeply manipulative at worst.
However this isn’t even the worst of what Saylor needed to say on the episode.
He went on to suggest that the banks that acquired bailed out within the 2008 monetary disaster problem their very own stablecoins, which might assist prop up the U.S. debt market.
“They ought to just create a normal regime to issue digital currency backed by U.S. treasuries,” mentioned Saylor.
“The U.S. ought to have a framework so Tether relocates to New York City. That’s what you want, right? And then you ought to basically have a free-for-all where JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs can issue their own stablecoin,” he added.
No, Michael Saylor, that’s not what I would like. In reality, it’s very removed from what I would like.
I don’t need Tether anyplace close to New York Metropolis (my hometown) and I don’t need JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs issuing U.S. greenback stablecoins that they management, basically the equal of CBDCs.
After I take into consideration Goldman Sachs, the very first thing that involves thoughts is award-winning author Matt Taibbi’s description of the establishment from his New York Instances bestseller Griftopia.
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere,” started Taibbi within the ebook. “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Goldman Sachs, very similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve, is an establishment that sucks the life drive from humanity. Bitcoin was designed to take energy away from such establishments, not strengthen them.
Towards the tip of the episode, Saylor laid out his grasp plan for bitcoin and U.S. greenback stablecoins.
Right here it’s:
“Everybody outside the U.S. would give their left arm to be capitalized on U.S. bonds. So, my strategy would be — and I really think it’s an evil genius strategy; it’s so good that our enemies would hate us, but our allies would complain, too. And the U.S. 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 monetize the bitcoin network. All the capital in the world, sitting in Siberian real estate or Chinese natural gas or every other currency derivative that’s held as a long-term store of value — Europeans, Africans, South Americans, Asians, they all just dump their crappy property and their crappy capital assets and they buy bitcoin. The price of bitcoin goes to the moon.
The U.S. is the big beneficiary. U.S. companies are the big beneficiary. And while you’re doing that, you normalize and support digital currency, and you just define digital currency as the U.S. dollar backed by U.S. dollar equivalents in a regulated U.S. custodian that’s audited. What happens next?
$150 billion of stablecoins goes to $1 trillion, $2 trillion, $4 trillion, $8 trillion, probably somewhere between $8 and $16 trillion, and you create $10 to $20 trillion of demand for U.S. sovereign debt.
While you’re taking away a little bit of the demand because the capital asset of bitcoin grows, you’re adding back the demand to back the stablecoin. [The digital U.S. dollar then] replaces the CNY, the Rubble. It replaces every African currency. It replaces every South American currency. It replaces the euro.
If you really believe in U.S. world reserve currency and U.S. values, every single currency in the world will actually just merge into the U.S. dollar if it was freely available.”
At this level, I ended listening to the episode and projectile vomited everywhere in the New York Metropolis subway automobile wherein I used to be sitting.
I didn’t come into the Bitcoin area to assist the U.S. run a scheme wherein it acquires a big share of the bitcoin whereas hooking the world on its trash foreign money, and it deeply saddens me that somebody that many within the Bitcoin area look as much as would give you such a conniving plan.
Bitcoin Is Cash
Bitcoin is cash. It’s a sort of cash that can not be censored or debased that has spectacularly grown in worth over the previous decade, making it one in all, if not essentially the most, highly effective instrument ever created for people.
To think about it as something much less, or to attempt to persuade individuals {that a} new iteration of an incumbent model of cash is best than it, is to be deeply misinformed.
Whereas bitcoin is capital, that’s not all it’s, and please don’t let Michael Saylor or anybody else persuade you in any other case.
This text is a Take. Opinions expressed are solely the creator’s and don’t essentially replicate these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
