The head of MicroStrategy is weighing in on the future of cryptocurrencies after industry leaders made the case for digital assets in front of Congress this week.
In an interview with Yahoo! Finance, Michael Saylor says it’s clear that Bitcoin (BTC) has proven itself to be an asset and not a security.
“I think the big winner of the Congressional hearings is Bitcoin. It’s pretty clear that there’s consensus at the Congressional level in support of crypto. It’s pretty clear that investors want to invest in the new digital economy.
Bitcoin’s universally acknowledged as common property and not a security, so there’s no regulatory overhang on Bitcoin.
If you want digital property as a long-term store of value, then every nation in the world – China, Europe, the United States – they all acknowledge that Bitcoin is digital property. It’s not a security.”
Saylor acknowledges that the rest of the digital asset space still awaits scrutiny to reach comparable levels of clarity but thinks it will come to pass.
“There’s a lot of questions about how other security tokens will be resolved, and the crypto exchanges and DeFi [decentralized finance].
Obviously, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it. There’s a lot of pressure to move forward with regulatory clarity.
I think it’ll happen, but in the meantime, I think the one takeaway that any reasonable investor could have is that Bitcoin’s here to stay…
There really isn’t any regulatory uncertainty around Bitcoin’s status as property, a commodity and a store of value.”
Moving on to the possibility that stablecoins could dethrone national currencies, the MicroStrategy CEO first explains the distinction he sees existing between crypto assets and currencies.
“I think it’s a mistake to characterize any of the cryptos as currencies.
They really should be thought of as crypto assets. Bitcoin is a crypto asset. It’s a property. It’s not a currency…
The dollar is a currency. The digital dollar is a digital currency.”
Saylor predicts that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have the dual potential of ensuring that the US dollar survives while also eliminating other weaker currencies around the world.
“I think that the digital dollar is destined to collapse the hundred weakest currencies in the world.
And the US dollar, which is currently the reserve currency of the world on 20th-century banking rails, is going to be the reserve digital currency of the world on 21st-century crypto rails…
The United States needs the digital dollar. We need stablecoins to spread.”
The macro investor concludes his analysis by issuing a pessimistic verdict about gold’s status as a safe-haven asset.
“The only thing that’s threatened by Bitcoin is gold. Here’s what’s happening – people are exchanging their weak currencies for strong currencies…
Gold is a weak property… What you want to do is hold a strong property that’s going to appreciate in value at least at the rate of monetary inflation.”
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