“So what is bitcoin, exactly?” Tucker Carlson asks.
To explain it, Tucker notes that they scoured the world for someone to explain it that had “skin in the game” and Michael Saylor fits that bill perfectly with billions of his firm MicroStrategy’s balance sheet invested in the cryptocurrency space.
Saylor begins: “Bitcoin is the first engineered monetary system in the history of the human race…full stop!”
And to explain it, “the first question is ‘whats money?’; the second question is ‘whats the problem?’; and the third question is ‘whats the solution?’.”
Very effective case for bitcoin here. The oxygen/blood metaphor is excellent. https://t.co/xpotFvXktp
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) December 1, 2021
And so the Microstrategy CEO begins by explaining what is money…
“Money is social, economic energy… it is monetary energy.”
Wending his way from African’s glass beads to gold and on to the present day, the bitcoin advocate notes that “money is that shared ledger of who owes what to whom,” explaining the difference between “weak money and strong money” in terms of being able to manufacture glass beads and dump them on Africa-past (glass beads are weak money) analogizing to the dollar (being able to ‘manufacture’ dollars and dump them on the world).
Because of the inflationary impact on goods of this ‘manufacturing’ of dollars, you’re never going to catch up because you are being paid the currency: “the only way you can actually stay ahead is to grow your cashflows faster than the rate of monetary inflation… and that’s why the rate of expansion of the money supply is so critical.”
Saylor makes the prescient point that while CPI dominates inflation discussions, “the government gets to pick what’s in that basket of goods and how it is weighted.”
The last decade has seen monetary inflation rise at around 14% per year… and the S&P has risen around 14% per year.
The best inflation rate for an investor, Saylor explains, or for anyone who wants to stay wealthy or be wealthy – if you’re concerned about maintaining your economic purchasing power – “it’s the monetary inflation rate – the rate at which the supply of money is expanding.”
Then Saylor takes us on a journey:
“…the currency is to the economy what your blood is to your body… and economic energy or money is to the currency what oxygen is to your blood.”
“So, common sense says that, if I keep sucking the oxygen out of the room, you’re going either suffocate or freeze to death…”
“…and if I keep sucking the economic energy out of the currency, the economy collapses… and in the extreme you get ripped back to stone-age barter.“
“…when the money doesn’t work anymore, I have trade you cigarettes for bullets… and the problem with that is the economy becomes a million times less efficient.”
“…how many countries in the world have a collapsed currency…66 of the dollarized [ZH: have an inflation problem]… there’s about 130 floating currencies and all of them are weaker than the dollar.”
“The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and the US dollar is expanding… it was expanding 10% a year for a decade… it’s now expanding at 14% a year and expanded 34% over the past 12 months…”
Saylor is discussing the expansion of the US money supply (in a TMS – True Money Supply or Rothbard-Salerno Measure)…
Saylor continues, “…thus the dollar is weakening… it’s like the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room…”
Saylor turns to Tucker and asks “..if I told you the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room… but there’s an oxygen mask dropped out of the ceiling over there, what would you do?”
Tucker exclaims “I’d run for it!”
Saylor replies “yeah, put the oxygen mask on…” concluding his analogy by explaining that “Bitcoin is the oxygen mask.”
As Tucker adds, Saylor has made the most compelling case I’ve ever heard for the need something like bitcoin:
“the whole point of bitcoin is to escape the inflation vortex that has consumed all these previous empires.”
Saylor clarifies further:
“…the point of bitcoin is to fix the money… and money is energy… and energy is life… and if I keep sucking the energy out of the economy, I’m sucking the oxygen out of your system…”
“…under the best case, you perform poorly. Under the worst case, I suffocate you to death, or freeze you to death.”
“That’s the problem. That’s why economies collapse… and that’s why empire’s collapse.”
Watch the full-length interview below:
