- Saylor warns currencies collapse every 30 years, with even the USD losing 99.9% of its value.
- Bitcoin represents a “digital gold” solution, weightless and capped at 21 million coins.
- An engineering mindset led Saylor to view Bitcoin as a thermodynamically sound system.
Michael Saylor’s journey to Bitcoin began during the 2020 crisis when his company faced potential decline amid zero interest rates and remote work threats. Speaking with Jordan Peterson in a podcast, the Strategy executive explained how his engineering background and study of monetary history led him to conclude that traditional stores of value fail over extended timeframes, making Bitcoin the superior choice for preserving wealth.
The billionaire’s analysis focuses on historical currency patterns that many investors overlook. According to Saylor, currencies collapse every 30 to 40 years across most political jurisdictions throughout human history. Even the US dollar, which he calls “the winning currency of the 20th century,” has lost 99.9% of its purchasing power over the past century. He stated that a house in Miami Beach that cost $100,000 in 1930 would require $100 million today.
Gold’s Hidden Weakness Creates Bitcoin Opportunity
Saylor’s engineering perspective revealed critical flaws in gold as a store of value that most economists overlook. While gold mining increases supply by approximately 2% annually, this seemingly small inflation rate creates a devastating compound effect. Over 100 years, gold’s value gets cut in half every 36 years. This means holders retain only 12.5% of their original purchasing power after a century.
The Strategy executive approached Bitcoin through what he calls a “fantasy engineering” lens, asking what would happen if someone could design perfect digital gold. His hypothetical divine currency would be weightless, instantly teleportable, impossible to mine additional units, and maintained through an incorruptible ledger. Bitcoin, he discovered, delivers these exact properties through cryptographic protocols and distributed network effects.
Saylor’s Technical Background Helped Him
Saylor’s technical background proved crucial in understanding Bitcoin. Drawing parallels to John Harrison’s longitude solution, where a perfect clock was created from imperfect materials through compensating mechanisms, Bitcoin achieves monetary perfection through fault-tolerant network design.
The crisis mentality that drove Saylor’s Bitcoin adoption stemmed from watching main street businesses destroyed while Wall Street profited from Federal Reserve money printing. With $500 million in corporate cash earning zero percent returns while asset prices inflated, he faced a choice between slow corporate death or transformation.
His analysis of available alternatives proved sobering. Real estate had doubled in value within weeks due to interest rate manipulation. Stock portfolios traded at all-time highs. Art markets lacked sufficient liquidity for large-scale allocation. Gold carried the historical burden of extended periods without returns, plus the fundamental inflation problem he identified.
Bitcoin Supports Saylor’s Libertarian Ideas
Bitcoin’s protocol nature reflected Saylor’s libertarian ideas based on the natural law. Government currencies are based on the subjective ethical rules determined by politicians. However, the Bitcoin network operates according to mathematical principles, which cannot be changed by anyone. The natural law of the Bitcoin network is based on sovereignty, truth, and thermodynamic soundness, according to Saylor.
Related: Is Bitcoin Finally Becoming a “Stable” Asset? The New Data Is Shocking
As an engineer, precise calculations are the primary foundation of his professionalism. The mining process is decentralized; therefore, it generates an internet virus. The protocol is operated by tens of thousands of mining technologies worldwide. In this case, Saylor’s personal experience illustrates how a crisis can produce new ideas or be adopted by traditional businesses, such as Strategy. Under normal conditions, no established businessman would ever risk multi-million-dollar losses on new technology without a solid base.
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