Michael Saylor, the chairman and co-founder of MicroStrategy, believes it is only a matter of time before Bitcoin becomes a bigger asset than gold. In a recent interview with Kitco News at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, Saylor shared his vision for the future of Bitcoin, gold and banking.
MicroStrategy became the first publicly traded company to buy Bitcoin in 2020 and now has billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
Successor of gold
Eventually, according to Saylor, Bitcoin will be so dominant that it will draw all the capital from gold to itself. He calls Bitcoin the “digital synthetic successor to gold.” An advantage of Bitcoin over gold, for example, is that storage costs are lower and that you do not have to rely on third parties to store it.
Furthermore, of course, Bitcoin’s inflation rate is lower, at least in the long run. After all, Bitcoin has an absolute scarcity of 21 million units, while we do not yet know exactly how much gold is in the earth’s crust.
Going forward, Saylor foresees large institutional investors, corporations, churches and other parties adopting Bitcoin on a massive scale. To achieve that, however, more good infrastructure is needed in the form of parties that manage Bitcoin for them.
According to Saylor, it is difficult for large corporates to manage their Bitcoin themselves from a legal and regulatory point of view. He should know, because that’s exactly what MicroStrategy has been doing for years.
The banking crisis
In the interview with Kitco News, Saylor also discusses the banking crisis, which he says is a political rather than an economic problem. Saylor says bailing out banks is a political decision. According to him, politicians can choose which banks to save and which ones will eventually fail.
In doing so, he points to the recent collapses of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and First Republic Bank, in which the US government bailed out the savers, but allowed the banks to collapse.
Saylor ended the interview by warning that it is dangerous to keep money in weak banks or banks in countries with weak currencies. Despite that, he has confidence in the savings deposits at US banks, but is skeptical about the shares of regional banks.