Bitcoin firebrand and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor says that recent criticisms against Bitcoin, including increased government scrutiny and intense volatility, are non-issues.
In a new interview with CNBC, Saylor addresses concerns that governments and agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department are closely looking at BTC as the leading crypto asset adds millions of people into its network every week.
“I think they’re non-issues because when you have an inflationary environment, money decomposes. The currency, which is the medium of exchange, and then the store of value, which is the asset, Bitcoin is an asset. It is regulated as an asset, taxed as an asset, [and] regulated as an asset. The governments said nothing anywhere in the world. In China, in Iran, in the US, people are holding this as an asset.
I think that the banks, their view is they don’t want you to challenge a currency like the US dollar and they want you to pay taxes when you transfer your assets. So for the Treasury Department to say, ‘If you transfer more than $10,000 of Bitcoin and oh, by the way, you’ve got to pay taxes when you transfer or sell it.’ That’s a totally non event because that’s been the status quo with every asset in the country forever.
This is just legitimizing Bitcoin as the apex asset, the best one. And I think it’s good for the industry.”
The big Bitcoin bull also talks about the intense volatility of the leading crypto asset after BTC’s drop from around $43,000 to $30,000 earlier this week.
“I think the big picture, if you look at the last 12 months is March 12th of 2020, we had $2 billion of trading on Binance and the price was around $5,000. On August 10th, when my company entered the entire Bitcoin market, we had a billion dollars of trading on Binance and the price is around $11,000. May 18th, biggest day maybe ever for Bitcoin, we had $13 billion traded with price around $37,000.
I think what those stats tell you is that Bitcoin is coming to life. It’s an institutional-grade, safe-haven asset. Although there’s volatility, the volatility is the price you pay for it to be 10x outperforming the S&P Index over a decade and be outperforming the S&P and Nasdaq by a factor of eight in the last 12 months.”
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