Michael Saylor (40:48)
Bitcoin is digital capital. It is the digital manifestation of economic scarcity. So if you want a functioning economy, actually, if you want a prosperous civilization, there are certain protocols you have to develop. One of them is language protocol. It's conservation of communication or clarity of communication. Can I tell you that north, beyond the mountains, there is a land of plenty? Or can I explain to you that you can eat that. That vegetable, but this one will kill you. You need a communication protocol, and it needs to be conservative. That is to say, if I tell you that's good, but I really meant bad, and if I tell you this will kill you, but I'm lying to you, the civilization breaks down, right? You have to have communication protocol with integrity. There are many. But whichever one you settle upon, in this case, English, which is what we for the most part settle upon, it needs to have integrity. And if you have a protocol with integrity, you can create a civilization, a market. You can cooperate, you can send your kids to school, you can work, you can create things, you can share, you can trade, then you need a mathematical protocol. I need a way to explain to you that I need six inches of steel, not three inches of steel, to avoid having the building collapse and kill everybody in it. Needs to have to have mathematical integrity, right? The conservation of energy. There you need science. You need, for example, enough science to figure out how to create a steel refinery that doesn't explode and burn everybody to death. And if you figure it out, then you can create guns. And if you figure out the guns and you figure out the germs, and you figure out the steel, then maybe you're going to actually rule the world. So scientific protocols, language protocols, mathematical protocols, these things matter. But what if you want to be rich? Why would you want to Be rich. Well, because if you don't have economic energy stored up, then on the day you lose your job, you starve to death. Or you would like to be able to store enough food so that if you have one year of drought, you don't all starve and die. Okay? So you need to be able to store energy. Animals store organic energy via fat. Fat is organic energy and organic battery. If you take away the fat, you're a type 1 diabetic. Go without eating for a week or two and you'll be dead. Societies store economic energy with what we call money. Maybe we call it capital. If you're a capitalist, you have enough money to live for 10 years without working, you can take a long view. You can actually posit that in seven years when the building is finished, that might be a profitable endeavor. If you don't have any capital, and if you stop working next week, you don't have any money, and then your kids starve to death. You don't have the luxury of making long term investments or dreaming about the future. You're never going to build a bridge or a building or a hospital because you just don't have the access energy to do it. So why Bitcoin? Well, all civilizations, they have a protocol. And I think the history of civilization is the most powerful ones displace the least powerful ones. This is almost a tautology, right? Who won? Oh, the most powerful nation won. Well, how do you define power? The ability to channel energy. Okay, so why would a nation that was on the gold standard be able to displace a nation on the glass bead standard? Because glass beads are stupid. Because you can manufacture a billion trillion glass beads and you can buy everything in the country on the glass bead standard, take it all for a nickel, and then you own them. And gold is not easy. You cannot manufacture a billion trillion ounces of gold quickly in an afternoon. There is no gold factory. So the nation on the more powerful protocol displaces the least powerful protocol. And it turns out that bow and arrows are better than fist, and bronze is better than wood, and iron is better than bronze, and steel is better than iron, and explosives are better than steel and cannons trump masonry. And if you study what happened in the New World when the Spaniards showed up, the fact that they had explosives and they had gunpowder and they had steel was very helpful. So Bitcoin simply represents the highest form of capital that the human race has yet to discover. We've been on a journey and gold reached. It reached a stable point, and it was the highest form of portable capital for a while. But in the 20th century, gold wasn't fast enough. It was too slow, too heavy. And if you can't move capital back and forth across the ocean 14 times a day, you cannot do high frequency international trade. So gold didn't keep up with the speed of the modern economy. What we wanted was a digital gold that we could actually move back and forth. And so how do you send $10 billion from here to there in an hour? I can't move a building, I can't move land, I can't move $10 billion worth of oil. Doesn't make any sense. I need a very dense, efficient, stable form of capital I can move. Bitcoin was born out of this idea of a peer to peer cash system. If you study the history of economics, cash settlement meant that I showed up with a container full of gold bullion or gold coin, and I traded it to you in return for whatever goods you had to sell or for your credit paper. And so the idea of bitcoin was, how do we settle our differences with something of global universal value. And why did it succeed? Because it was the best engineered network to do that. The most secure, the most reliable, the highest integrity one, the hardest one to hack, the one that was hardest to break, something that was stable and robust. It's like, why did Arabic numerals replace Greek or Babylonian or Roman numerals? Because Arabic isn't the first. It just happened to be the best. And when it came along, it totally obliterated all other mathematical systems because it was the most stable and the most rational and the most efficient. Bitcoin has done the same thing in the global capital markets. It's something that everybody can agree on. You can trade it, you can peer to peer, trade it between millions and millions of people. You can trade it on thousands of exchanges. It's got integrity and it's thermodynamically sound. If you wish to build something that'll last for 100 years, you need to know that it'll be stable for 100 years. And that means the materials in the building can't rust over 100 years, right?