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The suitcoiners are in town.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From a low-key, circular podium in the middle of a lavish New York City event hall, Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor took the mic and opened the Bitcoin Treasuries\u00a0Unconference<\/a> event. He joked awkwardly about the orange ties, dresses, caps<\/a> and other merch to the (mostly male) audience of who\u2019s-who in the bitcoin treasury company world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once he got onto the regular beat, it was much of the same: calm and relaxed, speaking freely and with confidence, his keynote was heavy on the metaphors and larger historical stories. Treasury companies are like Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil in its early years, Michael Saylor said: We\u2019ve just discovered crude oil and now we\u2019re making sense of the myriad ways in which we can use it \u2014 the automobile revolution and jet fuel is still well ahead of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n Established, trillion-dollar companies not using AI because of \u201csecurity concerns\u201d make them slow and stupid \u2014 just like companies and individuals rejecting digital assets now make them poor and weak.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d like to think that we understood our business five years ago; we didn\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n We went from a defensive investment into bitcoin, Saylor said, to opportunistic, to strategic, and finally transformational; \u201conly then did we realize that we were different.\u201d<\/p>\n Jokes aside, Michael Saylor is very welcome to the warm waters of our financial past<\/a>. He acquitted himself honorably by invoking the British Consol<\/a> \u2014 though mispronouncing it, and misdating it to the 1780s; Pelham\u2019s consolidation of debts happened in the 1750s and perpetual government debt existed well before then \u2014 and comparing it to the gold standard and the future of bitcoin. He\u2019s right that Strategy\u2019s STRC product in many ways imitates the consols; irredeemable, perpetual debt, issued at par, with the yield fluctuating around the fixed income. The difference is that instead of being backed and issued by the British government and managed by the Bank of England, STRC is issued and managed by Strategy, a private business intelligence company turned proto-bitcoin bank<\/a>. (And the Bank didn\u2019t micromanage the interest rate to target a specific yield.)<\/p>\n We\u2019re in the first year of reinventing the financial system, Saylor concluded.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe say that Bitcoin miners recycle stranded energy; well, bitcoin treasury companies recycle stranded capital.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Saylor pointed to pension funds and money market mutual funds and said, \u201cmore than two-thirds of the capital is locked up in structured institutions right now \u2014 it\u2019s capital sitting in a bank, a pension fund, an insurance fund, a retirement fund, an institutional investment fund.\u201d<\/p>\n All that could be freed, the bitcoin treasury company story goes, to be intermediated between the old world\u2019s incessant desire for \u201cyield\u201d and the new bitcoin world that Michael Saylor and Strategy is busy building.\u00a0<\/p>\n Michael Saylor thinks that fixing the money happens by fixing all the other money-adjecent industries: finance, regulation, corporate governance, security markets. He remarked, unironically, that during the various gold standards, credit on gold got bigger than the gold market itself. Implication: <\/em>there\u2019s plenty more paper bitcoin<\/a> to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a terrible role model, given that self custody, seizure resistance and unstoppable transfers are what bitcoin does so well over gold. Centralized markets and paperized gold is what broke the old world\u2019s \u201cperfect money.\u201d<\/p>\n Toward the end, we got a nice, little dig at some rival treasury companies not doing a good job.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a certain amount of money that\u2019ll come to you, that\u2019s easy to get, that\u2019s just not good for you\u2026 it\u2019s hard to do the things that are going to create massive shareholder value for your company. It\u2019s easy to get big and do things that basically transfer your equity and your collateral to an investor.\u201d<\/p>\n We used to dream of liberating money from the paper money system we sleepwalked into during the 20th century. Here we are in the 21st, our best and brightest minds \u2014 most of them in this very room \u2014 trying their hardest to make paper out of bitcoin.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a nice vision if it works; if it doesn\u2019t, it\u2019ll be disastrous for the orange dream.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nMichael Saylor: You Come Into My Financial History House?!<\/h2>\n
Bitcoin Treasuries: Walking A Tightrope<\/h2>\n