Michael Saylor, executive chairman of MicroStrategy, said Bitcoin could help solve half of the world’s economic problems, especially for countries struggling with challenges related to rising national debt.
Saylor made the statement during his presentation at the Bitcoin2024 conference, where he highlighted Bitcoin’s transformative potential and its role in reshaping the global economy with digital capital.
He said:
“The world as we know it is based on ideas and technology from the 20th century. If we want to thrive in the 21st century, we need new ideas based on new technology.”
Saylor’s presentation included a discussion about the future value of Bitcoin. He predicted that Bitcoin could reach $13 million per coin by 2045, based on a conservative annual growth rate.
He encouraged individuals, companies and countries to adopt Bitcoin as a primary treasury investment asset and use it for long-term capital preservation.
Nations and Bitcoin
Saylor advocated reallocating government reserves from gold and bonds to Bitcoin, issuing currency and debt to purchase Bitcoin, and enacting favorable laws to encourage Bitcoin ownership. He suggested that the first country to fully embrace Bitcoin could reap significant economic benefit.
According to Saylor:
“The first country to buy Bitcoin by issuing its own currency wins.”
He explained how countries, especially those with significant debt, can use Bitcoin to solve their economic problems. He proposed a strategy where indebted countries could reallocate their treasury reserves from short-term assets such as gold and bonds to Bitcoin, a long-term digital asset.
By doing so, these countries could leverage Bitcoin’s growth potential to pay off debt and even achieve economic prosperity. He outlined several strategies for countries to adopt Bitcoin, ranging from modest allocations to aggressive investments.
The “maxi” strategy involves putting a third of a country’s treasury into Bitcoin, while the “double maxi” strategy suggests an allocation of 65%. The most aggressive approach, the ‘triple maxi’ strategy, recommends putting all government bonds into Bitcoin and issuing debt to acquire even more.
Saylor explained it succinctly:
“The normie strategy is you owe $3 trillion. You won’t get anywhere. The maxi strategy pays off your debts. The double maxi strategy makes you rich. The triple maxi strategy makes you very rich. Why? Because you buy the property that everyone will run to in 100 years, and you just buy it now.”
Archaic systems
Saylor’s presentation highlighted the inefficiency of the current financial system, which he described as slow and expensive. He pointed out that global wealth is estimated at $900 trillion, while Bitcoin represents only $1 trillion of that amount.
Saylor emphasized that the global economy’s dependence on outdated systems is crippling the preservation of capital, saying:
“The global economy is struggling because we rely on imperfect resources and imperfect systems to store that primary population. It paralyzes our capital preservation.”
He discussed the concept of “the physics of money,” comparing energy to money or capital, and discussed the importance of the “lifespan” of money. He compared various assets, from currencies such as the Turkish lira and the US dollar to physical assets such as gold and real estate, highlighting their vulnerability to inflation, depreciation and other factors.
In contrast, he portrayed Bitcoin as an “immortal, immutable and intangible” form of capital that offers significantly longer life and greater resilience.
According to Saylor:
“Bitcoin is digital capital. It has an infinite lifespan. It is not attacked by the forces of weather, entropy and inflation. It solves the problem we are all facing.”