MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor is comparing Bitcoin to the disruptive video sharing giant YouTube.
In a new episode of The Saylor Series with Robert Breedlove, Saylor says Bitcoin’s ability to let people manage their own money is similar to the way YouTube allows people to run their own digital broadcasting network.
“YouTube allows you to become your own TV station. So, what are we talking about here, well the cliche, ‘be your own bank,’ it’s kind of a cliche. And I think if we look at it a different way, it’s like, I’m a normal person, I endow my own monetary energy into Bitcoin, I plug it into some digital network, I give the keys to someone I trust, a family member maybe.
Maybe I do multi-sig instead of having five people on a board. If you have five people on a board of an endowment with a hundred million or a billion dollars in the endowment, they’re kept honest by filing annual tax forms with the IRS. And in theory, they can be personally liable if they defraud the foundation or abuse their fiduciary trust. But you know, it’s kind of like a 20th-century idea.
A better idea would be, I put the money into a Bitcoin, and I have like three or five digital keys and it takes three out of the five to vote on everything. And then, every three months they have to register that they’re online, and of healthy mind and spirit. If someone stops registering then the remaining four automatically appoint a fifth. Whenever anybody retires, they automatically transfer their key.
What I’ve done is, I’ve de-materialized an endowment board of directors, corporation, institution, and it’s just become maybe a simple application in cyberspace plugged into a base layer of monetary energy. It’s doing something, whatever that something is. That’s an operation of people and digital networks and crypto networks in order to allow people to achieve their hopes and desires over long periods of time.”
Saylor says he believes the mainstream remains too focused on Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange, and its potential as a store of value is far more valuable.
“If you go back 50 years, people talked about ounces of gold. So I think a Bitcoin will be like an ounce of gold, like an immutable self-sovereign unit of economic energy…
I think ultimately people focus too hard on medium exchange, unit of measure and underestimate the value of bitcoin as a store of value, and as an asset. I think they don’t do it justice because it’s so much better than every other asset…
It’s in my opinion utterly unimportant that you be able to engage in high frequency small transactions on the Bitcoin network and I think that it’s dysfunctional to pursue that vision. The magic of bitcoin is being able to catapult energy 100 years in the future and not lose the energy.”
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