LINGUA CONTRA IMPERIUM
The Language of Bitcoin: 6
Michael Saylor
Every company on Earth is sitting on a balance sheet that is normally cash and credit. With a few exceptions, everyone is holding some form of local fiat currency. If they want an alternative to that, they’re holding low risk debt or sovereign debt. Cash and credit.
Cash and credit are crumbling. They’ve always been crumbling. But now they’re crumbling at a faster rate. In good times they’re crumbling at 7% a year and in bad times they’re crumbling at 10 or 15 or 20% a year. In horrific times, if you’re in Venezuela, Argentina, or Lebanon, they’re crumbling at 60-80% a year. That’s hyperinflation.
One year ago we were staring at a balance sheet with $500 million dollars in cash and credit and it looked like it was almost certainly going to crumble at a rate of 15% a year for four years. That drove us to discover Bitcoin. A lightbulb went off and I realized we could swap out that $500 million dollars for something better.
There are a lot of ways to view Bitcoin. You can view Bitcoin as digital property, digital money, or digital energy. If you characterize it as digital property, then I bought a $500 million block of property in cyber space. If you characterize it as digital money, then I bought $500 million of a currency that nobody can print any more of. If you characterize it as digital energy, then we took analog energy and digitized it.
You can hold digital energy as Bitcoin on the network forever with no power loss. No real cost to move it. No cost to hold it. No constraints on the storing of it. The half-life of Bitcoin is forever.
When
