No Bitcoin conference would be complete without an injection of bullish optimism from Michael Saylor, and the executive chairman of MicroStrategy delivered on that promise in Nashville Friday.
The macroeconomic stars have aligned to send Bitcoin to the moon, Saylor believes, predicting that Bitcoin’s market capitalization will reach $280 trillion by 2045, overshadowing categories like art and gold. That’s an increase of roughly 280X from its current market cap of just over $1 trillion.
Saylor is believed to own more than $1 billion in Bitcoin himself, and MicroStrategy has cultivated a reputation as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, possessing more of the asset than any other publicly traded company. As of Friday, the firm had around 226,000 Bitcoin in its coffers, worth around $15.3 billion in value.
Speaking before hundreds of attendees at this year’s annual confab, Saylor’s keynote speech attracted around 8,000 conference goers. Some waited in line for well over an hour to watch the popular Bitcoin thinker and listen to his ever-increasing embrace of Bitcoin in-person.
“The global economy struggles because we're relying upon imperfect assets and imperfect systems to store that capital,” Saylor said, calling Bitcoin the “little orange asset that it could.”
Saylor spoke of the “useful life” of different assets, from government-backed debt to Ferraris, which don’t last very long. The popular Bitcoin evangelist contrasted those assets with digital capital, an innovation, he said, that could far outlast them.
“Entropy is diluting the value of their physical assets,” Saylor said, citing “war, famine, and catastrophe” as other factors that hurt the value of normal assets in the long run.
However, Bitcoin held with a custodian could have a useful life of around 1,000 years, Saylor said. Bitcoin that is self-custodied could have a useful life of 10,000 years, he added. And Bitcoin with its custody maintained by artificial intelligence, he said, could last 100,000 years. This view partly helps explain Saylor’s sharp pivot to Bitcoin just four years ago.
MicroStrategy began acquiring Bitcoin for its corporate treasury following the pandemic-induced market crash of 2020. And it hasn’t slowed down since. The company added around 12,000 Bitcoin to its balance sheet in June, when Bitcoin’s price hovered around $65,000, according to Bitcoin Treasuries. The acquisition represented MicroStrategy’s 39th buy since it first purchased Bitcoin for around $12,000 in August 2020.
Saylor often points to MicroStrategy’s stock price as evidence of its success. Year-to-date, the company’s stock price has rallied 155% to around $1,750, punching as high as $1,919 in March.
“It will be 48 months on August 10 of this year since we started down this road,” Saylor said, noting that many companies out there are currently trying to copy the chipmaker Nvidia. “The irony is it's easy to copy MicroStrategy. I just gave you the playbook.”
OneMedNet, a publicly-traded technology company providing clinical imaging solutions, did indeed take a page out of Saylor’s playbook before the executive took the stage. The company announced just before that it had invested $1.8 million from a private placement in Bitcoin.