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In brief
Michael Saylor is the CEO of MicroStrategy.
He explained the public company's recent purchase of Bitcoin.
Saylor thinks most assets that aren't Bitcoin are negatively affected by expansionary monetary policy.
In a webinar today, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor told Kraken’s Dan Held that Bitcoin is a $250 billion “solution to $250 trillion worth of a problem.”
MicroStrategy is a business analytics firm that bought 38,250 Bitcoin in August and September. It holds more Bitcoin than all other publicly traded companies combined.
In explaining the reason behind the company’s $425 million purchases (now worth closer to $520 million), Saylor pointed to what he said is a $250 trillion market for alternative assets.
According to Saylor, “99.9% of all the assets in the world are in ‘alt’ assets—$250 trillion in bonds, stock, real estate, precious metals, derivatives,” whereas there’s just a $250 billion market cap for Bitcoin.
Alternative assets are typically defined as things that aren’t stocks, bonds, or certificates, so Saylor might essentially be reclassifying the asset categories here: Anything that isn’t Bitcoin is an “alt asset.”
Decrypt was unable to tally up the total value of all the world’s assets (the price of a CryptoKitty is too subjective). However, using Saylor’s criteria, those assets are likely worth closer to $500 trillion, with the global real estate market alone estimated to be worth $280.6 trillion.
Regardless of the number, his point is a larger one. “In an environment where you’re expanding the monetary supply, you’re sucking the energy out of a unit of currency,” Saylor said, seemingly referring to the Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply and exceeding its earlier 2% inflation target, “all the equities, all the bonds have to be valued at...a discount rate.”
And that’s the $250 trillion problem in Saylor’s eyes: All of those assets become worth less in real terms as the buying power of a unit of currency declines.
The solution, to Saylor, is Bitcoin, which is designed to have a fixed supply and be non-inflationary.
“99.9% of the people don’t understand the solution,” Saylor said, but with a $250 billion market cap we’re a bit past the point where government regulators, hackers, or others could have snuffed it out.
Said Saylor, “We have a forest fire.” And MicroStrategy is fanning the flames.
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