SPEECH TITLE: BITCOIN IS FOR EVERYONE
SPEAKER: MICHAEL SAYLOR
CONFERENCE: BITCOIN ATLANTIS 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Welcome, and thank you for coming. I’m happy to be in Madeira. I was delighted to get a chance to speak, but I was terrified because I knew that this crowd would already know everything I had already said, and I would have to produce something new.
I’m here to put your fears to rest. I am not going to recite the Breedlove-Saylor series verbatim, and we’re not going to revisit my 4-hour Lex Friedman podcast.
Instead, I’ve put together a new presentation for today, and this is the first time I am presenting it. The title is ‘Bitcoin is for Everyone.’ I was asked to talk about how Bitcoin can impact corporations and individuals, and I often get asked about how governments perceive Bitcoin.
I’ve spent a lot of my time dealing with corporations, talking to executives, engaging with institutional investors, speaking to politicians, and reading thousands of pages of government filings. I’m the kind of guy who will listen to every minute of congressional testimony just to know what each of the 40 congressmen thought or said. Admittedly, I will do it on ‘speed listen,’ but I listen because I want to know their thoughts.
So, what I’ve prepared today is an amalgamation of my views on this, and I think this is the perfect audience. After I finish, I’m sure I’ll get a chance to meet some of you, and I look forward to getting your feedback.
The Universality of Asset Conversion
So, I’m going to start with a simple observation that I think we all understand: to survive, everyone must convert their work into assets that are scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. If you’re a living creature, you’re converting your work into organic energy, which we call fat.
Fat is the most scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable asset in the organic world. It might have been demonized, but if you can’t generate fat, you’re a Type 1 diabetic. Life is going to be short, brutal, and difficult. You really need to be able to store energy. Whether you’re an individual, a company, a family, or a government, you face the same exact challenge of converting work into assets.
The Digital Asset Revolution
We all know Bitcoin is the best asset, do you agree? There is no second-best asset, and that is why we are here: because we need an asset. Bitcoin is the best there is; there’s no second best. But why is that the case?
Well, let’s just start with the fact that Bitcoin is digital, and the entire world for the last 5,000 years has lived on analog assets: real estate, gold, silver, paper money, bonds, buildings, collectibles, sports teams, livestock, cattle, bales of tobacco, seashells, and glass beads. Now, we have a digital asset; in fact, this is THE digital asset—maybe the only digital asset.
Now, what kind of asset is it? Well, you could think of it as digital capital, and, as we know, there are hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital in the world. Bitcoin is digital capital. You could also call it property; we have hundreds of trillions of dollars of property in the world, and Bitcoin is digital property, something you can own. We could also call it wealth; Bitcoin is digital wealth. Analog wealth is when you own hundreds of acres of land somewhere. We can also refer to it as digital money, a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account.
However, as you see, sometimes when people get focused on money, they immediately go to the medium of exchange and think about currency, leading them into a very political discussion in opposition to the peso, the dollar, or the Naira, which becomes very political. When you come back to thinking of it as property or wealth, then it becomes much less political. And of course, my favorite, Bitcoin is digital energy.
Now, fat is organic energy; the universe is made up of energy. Matter is static energy. Einstein showed us that when he gave us E=mc², he said matter is energy, and energy is matter.
Bitcoin is more than these things. I could go on for a while, but the point of this is not to talk to you about what Bitcoin is—you already know what Bitcoin means to you. The real point of this discussion is to talk about what Bitcoin means to the rest of the world.
Participants in the Bitcoin Network
Bitcoin is going to have many types of participants in the future. These participants will be individuals, families, investment companies, operating companies, banks, nonprofit organizations, and governments.
Individuals and Creativity
One set of participants, one set of people that are going to be plugged into the Bitcoin network, are clearly individuals. There are 8 billion individuals on the planet. What are individuals going to contribute to the Bitcoin network? They bring creativity, clarity, conviction, capability, and conscience to the world, and of course, they are going to HODL. They’re going to hold Bitcoin for life, right? How many? Lots!
Right now, there are hundreds of millions of individuals that have an interest in Bitcoin in one way or another. It’s going to be billions; it’s going to continue to grow. A lot of our education is really focused on the individual, but I think that we can’t stop with the individual because these individuals form groups, families, corporations, governments, nonprofits, clubs, and churches. There are a lot of ways that individual creativity and aspiration manifest themselves, and of course, one of my favorites is families.
Families and Continuity
There are a lot of ways that individual creativity and aspiration manifest themselves, and of course, one of my favorites is families. There are about a billion families, and why do families matter? They’re the future of humanity; that’s why they matter! Families bring compassion, community, continuity, joy, and hope. A family is just a much more powerful unit than just an individual. Families will HODL. We are starting to think about families now and how they join the network.
Investment Companies: A New Frontier
But, there’s a third organization, a third type of group: an investment company. This set of organizations has not been involved in Bitcoin much for the first 15 years of its existence, but investment companies, such as mutual funds, trust funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—and these can be hedge funds—have not just trillions, but probably a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of assets floating out there. They get to decide how those assets will be disposed of and how they’ll be situated, and they are actually acting on behalf of families and on behalf of individuals.
So, on one hand, you can’t write them off when they can decide to reallocate $10 billion from gold to Bitcoin on behalf of 18 million retirees that used to work for the postal service, right? And when they make that decision, they’re not only impacting families and individuals, but they’re also making the decision as a fiduciary. The last 36 days have been an illustration of how important these kinds of companies are because every day in the market, they’re buying hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, they’re trading it, and they’re building up billion-dollar positions.
This has just started; we’re 36 days into a massive adoption of just these exchange-traded funds, but it’s going to keep going, and they’re going to ripple all through the world, through all sorts of economies, and they will have a profound impact, and in my opinion, a profound impact for good.
It used to be, if you go back to 2018 in the Bitcoin community, if you mentioned Larry Fink, people would say, ‘Oh, Larry Fink doesn’t like us.’ But in the year 2024, Larry Fink went on television and spoke to leaders in the world, saying, ‘Bitcoin is a store of value, it protects the sovereignty of the individual, it allows you to achieve your hopes; it is hope.’ Larry Fink said, ‘Bitcoin is hope!’
Now, what does that say to me? It says we don’t have enemies. What we have are people who need Bitcoin but don’t yet know why they should be our friend. When someone goes on television and they’re asked, ‘What do you think about Bitcoin?’ and they get poked, and they’re a little bit irritated they got asked the question, they’re not an enemy of Bitcoin; they’re just not prepared for the question.
In fact, over time, the journalists will do the poking because they know the most important thing in the world today is Bitcoin. You will have a group of people that understand it and will say, ‘It’s the future,’ and you’ll have a group of people that don’t understand it and have not embraced it. But, at the end of the day, with time and with education, we’re going to see more and more people join the network, and they’re going to participate.
The Role of Operating Companies
Now, those investment companies aren’t the only type of companies. There are operating companies. If you do a quick Google search, ‘333 million’ is the count on Google of companies in the world. Think about that for a second: 333 million. There are a lot of companies, and all of these individuals and all of these families, they all act through corporate entities.
Oftentimes, you’ll see a group of five or six, or 10, or 50, or 500, or 5,000, or 50,000. How important are companies? Well, they provide all the products, all the services, they develop technology. Not many people in the room can create their own iPhone, you know? Not many people in the room want to manufacture and ship all their food, or grow their own fruit in the winter. These companies are critical to our quality of life; we know that from Austrian economics.
If you’re wondering how long we’ve had specialization of labor, one million years ago they dug up stone axe factories, so this indicates that a million years ago, before we had writing, before there was recorded history, there was a company manufacturing stone axes, which meant that there was a specialized economy with corporations. There were probably people growing food, there were people hunting, there were people fighting, there were probably people collecting taxes to pay for the stone axes for the people fighting. It’s all happened before.
Today, companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft perform systemically important roles, as does the airline that flew you here, as does the contractor that built the stadium, or the bridges, or the tunnels, or the airports you landed on. These are important. What are they going to bring to Bitcoin? Well, they’re going to bring new services like Cash App, new products, signing devices, full nodes, integrated nodes, or they’re going to introduce other new technology one day.
I believe Apple, Microsoft, Google will all integrate Bitcoin and Layer 2 protocols like Lightning into their phones, into their computers, into their web services, into their cloud services. They’re going to bring cool applications. Every single Bitcoin wallet, Lightning wallet, is a cool application; they were all made by a corporation. They’re going to provide support, and, maybe more importantly, they provide credibility. Companies have credibility with people.
When a large corporation offers something to a billion people over the weekend, you get 437 million downloads. An individual can’t get 437 million people to do anything over the weekend. When a company has a problem, they pick up the phone, they call the White House, or they call a senator, or they call a congressman, or they go to court, and they sue. Companies actually can avail themselves of the legal system, the political system, the executive branch.
Sometimes they’re involved in controversies, but companies have credibility, and that credibility will defend the network, spread the network, and enhance the network. They will actually embrace, enhance, and support the lives of every individual and every family. We need them. Companies are not the evil empire creature that’s against you.
Companies are just made up of people, and the person running the company either understands Bitcoin or they don’t. If they don’t, then they’re just a supporter waiting to be recruited. Or, they’ll be someone who understands it and owns it personally, waiting for the political environment in their company to change so that they can buy it corporately.
Tim Cook has admitted to owning Bitcoin. Many senior-level CEOs own it. Sometimes, they’re reacting to their shareholders, their board of directors, their employees, their regulators. Privately, individually, they would pursue one agenda, but publicly, because they have to represent the corporate interest and they have to respect the constituencies they serve, like the customers who don’t understand it, they have to wait until their customers understand it or demand it before they can move.
Banks and Financial Infrastructure
Ultimately, these operating companies are going to be great supporters of the network; they already are, and they will HODL. They’re going to build Bitcoin on their balance sheets, leading us to everyone’s favorite: banks. ‘You can be your own bank’—that’s the promise of Bitcoin. But, you know, there are thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of banks in the world, serving who knows how many billions of people, and they custody hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets. They are intertwined essentially in the fabric of the economy. Bitcoin offers them something too. It offers them the same benefits it offers a family and an individual.
What do corporations do? They custody; they extend credit; they’ll give you a loan; and they deal with compliance rules. How many different sets of rules are there in the world? There are 10,000 jurisdictions, 10,000 different sets of rules, and the banks have armies of lawyers, accountants, and compliance people to figure out how to give you a mortgage, or to figure out how to give you a car loan. It’s a lot of work.
You don’t really want to borrow money from the dude down the street. They call that a ‘loan shark,’ and yes, you can do it, but the interest rate is going to run up to 70% a year, not 7% a year.
So, however bad you think it is with a bank, it gets infinitely worse when it’s an individual that doesn’t sue you; they break your legs when you don’t pay the bill. Banks are really important for these reasons. They also play an important role in transfer settlement, moving assets around millions of times a day, or billions of times a day. Banks will HODL; banks will hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet in time.
Nonprofits and Social Impact
As will nonprofits. How important are nonprofits? Your church, your school, your soccer team, or your clubs (the Garden Club, the Pet Club, the Horse Association, the Olympics)—every possible nonprofit, every activist group. Did you know that almost 6% of the US economy is comprised of nonprofits? It’s an incredible amount, right?
So, what can they contribute? Well, they educate, they empower, they will expand the Bitcoin Network throughout the world. They’ll go places that maybe you don’t want to go. They will drive engagement; they have missions to engage with the weak, the young, the old, the poor—I mean, everybody, everywhere. They go into dangerous war zones; they’re the Red Cross; they provide medical services; they provide advocacy.
They’re pretty effective at providing advocacy when they’re on your side. They spread ideas all through the world, and when they’re against you, they can also be not so good. They’re endowed. The greatest endowments in the world, like the Harvard and Yale endowments—these institutions, like Cambridge or Oxford, have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. That’s because they have endowments. Bitcoin is the best asset for an endowment, right? This is a solution for them, and this is a need they have, and we will see more and more of them embrace this.
Governments and Global Participation
I’m going to end with governments, because oftentimes people think, ‘Well, the government is against Bitcoin.’ What I’m here to say is that the government is made up of people. The government’s role is to provide essential services everywhere on Earth, dealing with defense, water, sewer, education, medicine, insurance, social security for the young, the old, and the orphans. There are a lot of things governments do, including keeping traffic flowing and ensuring the ports are operational.
So, what can they bring to the Bitcoin Network? Education! The only reason I’m here is that I was invited by the President of Madeira. Governments have this role. To integrate, they will provide security, and I think governments will eventually engage in Bitcoin mining. They will support Bitcoin miners; they will defend Bitcoin miners. When you see a world with a hundred different countries, all of them mining Bitcoin, then an attack on one of the Bitcoin miners may result in a response by another country. So, I think the governments will also be advocates. Governments have balance sheets, and governments will HODL. So, everybody here, they all need Bitcoin. They can all contribute to Bitcoin, and they all support it.
The key point, when I say ‘everyone,’ I don’t mean every person; I mean every entity, everyone you love, the ones you hate, your enemies, your friends, the company you dislike, the company that you adore, the other family, your favorite sports team, and the awful soccer team that beat your soccer team, the awful football team that beat your football team.
It’s not just Bedford that needs Bitcoin; everybody benefits from Bitcoin. They might not know it, but they do benefit. Why do they benefit? Because the story of civilization is about purging toxicity from our systems. Humans started living longer when we realized we shouldn’t drink water with germs in it. Then we realized we need to cook our food to get the toxic germs out of the food. Then, at some point, we realized that if we could get the toxic pathogens out of our blood, we might live longer. Antibiotics are about getting the toxins out of your blood. Sterilization, boiling water, is about getting the toxins out of the water. Cooking food is about getting the toxins out of the food.
We’ve lived with toxic money for 5,000 years. The money is simply the economic energy coursing through every government, every corporation, every group, every family, every individual. When it’s moving through your P&L, it’s toxic, undermining your performance. When you store it in your treasury, then it’s actually just undermining your life expectancy. So, toxicity is holding us back.
In 1900, the average life expectancy was 50. By 1950, it had risen to 70. This increase was largely due to the conquest of infectious diseases, or another way to say it, overcoming toxic pathogens. We achieved this through a combination of sterilization, modern medicine, and antibiotics. Everybody wants to live longer, even those you disagree with or those whose missions you don’t support. They all strive for longevity and achievement without being held back by toxicity.
Everyone needs it, everyone benefits from it, but the most important point is that everyone benefits from Bitcoin. When the bank you despise starts to custody Bitcoin, that just means the Bitcoin you self-custody became worth 10 times as much. The ETFs that have bought up 1% of the supply of Bitcoin have conveyed a benefit 100 times greater to those who don’t believe in ETFs. It’s like a $400 billion dividend to people who dislike ETFs. They’re not harming you. When your enemy joins, you improve, the network strengthens, and the likelihood of war decreases.
If we want to eliminate war, conflict, and violence, we should hope all our enemies settle their differences in a fair, equitable, and peaceful manner, and Bitcoin offers such a pathway. Therefore, you shouldn’t fear those who don’t understand or are currently your adversaries joining Bitcoin; you should be concerned about those enemies who refuse to join Bitcoin, as they are the ones more likely to resort to violence to solve problems.
The Empowering Potential of Bitcoin
Let’s explore Bitcoin’s ability to offer individuals unparalleled freedom and security, highlighting its impact on economic autonomy and personal empowerment.
For Individuals: Freedom and Security
So, let’s get to the happy part: how are individuals going to benefit from Bitcoin? What does Bitcoin bring you? It empowers everyone to live their best possible life. It brings you freedom—economic freedom, political freedom. You can go where you want; you have control of your destiny. It’s not that different from the experience of people who fast. We’ve discovered that you don’t need to eat for three or four days, and realizing you don’t have to eat for five days at a time is pretty empowering. I can go through an airport without stopping to eat, and it’s pretty amazing!
Imagine being able to go where you want, opening up opportunities for yourself. It provides you with emotional security, mental security, physical security, and economic security. It fosters camaraderie. Look at us all here today. I have something in common with every one of you, and it’s just awesome. I invite you all to think about your relationships and the nature of those relationships before you discovered Bitcoin, and then consider how they’ve changed after you discovered Bitcoin. It’s like coming out of the darkness and into the light. That’s why I see Bitcoin as empowerment and hope for the individual.
For Families: Legacy and Security
But what does it mean for the family? It is a foundation to support your family for generations. What is the tragedy of the family? The tragedy of a family occurs when you run your family on toxic money, building your legacy on defective assets and property. Consider a classic cliché tragedy: A family comes to this country, the great-grandfather buys a farm, the grandfather and the father both farm the land, but now they can’t pay the taxes on it and have to sell it, moving into apartments.
Why? Because relying on property as an asset has become defective. It was the best idea 200 years ago, but if you own a thousand acres and then someone establishes a state, and a mayor gets elected who decides to spend lavishly, raising your taxes once, twice, thrice, soon the farming family can’t afford the taxes. Then, the government decides you’re the bad guy, takes all your land, and evicts you. Maybe it doesn’t happen directly; maybe first, you mortgage the farm, then can’t pay the mortgage, and the bank seizes your property. That’s a tragedy.
The tragedy is building your family on defective assets and money. It’s not your fault! Go back a million years, and people were dying at age 28 with no antibiotics. We didn’t know sugar was toxic, our teeth fell out. We didn’t know how to deal with pneumonia or infections. A cut could be fatal. Drinking contaminated water could kill. Eating the wrong food could lead to dysentery or cholera.
The history of humanity is filled with death and suffering due to toxicity, and the promise of technology is to first identify the toxicity through science. The microscope allowed us to see bacteria in the blood that were killing us. You need the instrument, the understanding, and then you solve the problem. That is the story of civilization. That is how humans progress.
With families, many struggle due to a defective economic strategy. Bitcoin provides a foundation that can be used to protect your family, relocate anywhere, change your career, create a legacy, accumulate assets, accumulate wealth, and plan for the future.
If you had asked me before Bitcoin how I planned to create or fund a foundation for the next hundred years, I would have said something like, ‘I guess I give all my money to Wall Street,’ and I hire some good money managers. Then, 70 years from now, the grandson of someone I hired today might go to college, figure out what to do, and day trade or shuffle my money around so I don’t lose it. That’s the best idea—but it’s not a good idea, right? That’s how the Rockefellers do it.
What you’ll see is that, a hundred years after someone accumulates some wealth, the money’s generally gone 99% of the time. What Bitcoin offers to families is the ability to actually plan for your great-granddaughter and think that there’ll be some support for them, and no one is going to take it from them.
Investment Companies and Capital Attraction
Why do those investment companies need Bitcoin? They need Bitcoin to attract capital. You see it happening: $600 million flowing into BlackRock yesterday, $10 billion in a month. If you look at the ETFs, what you’ll see is that the Bitcoin ETFs are climbing past all the commodities. They’re about to surpass the gold ETFs, and then they’re going to surpass the S&P 500 index ETFs.
When that happens, everyone will take note. Vanguard will take note that the world is changing. You can’t attract capital without Bitcoin, and you can’t outperform Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to outperform the S&P, gold, and bonds. As it does, everyone who is indifferent and objective, who doesn’t know what it is and doesn’t care, will simply say, ‘Move more of my money over here,’ because the world is full of people who just want to not lose their money.
So, what we’re going to see is investment companies needing this to outperform, and that’s going to result in them generating income and staying relevant. I mean, how many people are bragging about their new gold ETF? It’s not relevant. They’re not relevant.
You want to be a leader? The people we look up to are those who discovered or created Google, Apple, and Microsoft; those who created the next airplane; those who put Starlink in the sky and give us internet; those who give us the next phone. Be relevant, be a leader. These companies want to be leaders. You won’t find a CEO who says, ‘My aspiration is to be viewed as a follower and late to the next great thing.’ They all want to create shareholder value. You can’t create shareholder value by shrinking.
Operating Companies: Sustaining Business
So, that takes us to operating companies. It’s the same thing, but for the most part, operating companies in the world are like Type 1 diabetics. I had 100 competitors over 20 years; they all failed. There’s a 99% mortality rate with these companies. You look at the number and think, ‘Well, I don’t know about 300 million companies,’ but that’s because they’re failing—millions every single month. They’re all failing all the time.
Why are they failing? They can’t store energy; they can’t harness capital. What does Facebook do? They give all their capital back to the shareholders in dividends and buybacks. What does Apple do? The same, plus they take on debt. How do companies fail? They leverage up; they take on debt. What happens when you take on debt? I used to say, ‘We have 500 million in capital; we could go for 40 quarters, for 10 years without making any money, and we’d still be in business.’ You could go for 10 years without eating and still be alive—that’s indestructible.
On the other hand, when you give all the money back and borrow a billion dollars, you end up with a debt covenant requiring you to generate 27 million this quarter. If you generate $26 million, if you miss by one-thousandth of your capital structure, if you miss by 0.1%, you trip all the debt covenants, and the bank owns you. You’re technically in violation of your debt. They can call the loan. You’re insolvent.
Think about the difference between starving to death if you miss one meal versus starving to death when you haven’t eaten for a year. That’s the difference between having capital and having no capital. The status quo in the world today tells people you can’t keep capital in an operating company because all the uses of liquid capital are dilutive and don’t beat the cost of capital. Bitcoin solves this problem.
You can harness capital, improve your products, grow your revenues, and beat inflation for the first time. The ‘Magnificent Seven’ are good investments. The other 493 companies are not because they cannot beat inflation, which means increasing your cash flow by 8% every year forever, or more like raising your prices by 10% a year forever. Who can do that? A digital monopoly, a company with no cost and monopoly pricing power. How many of them are there in the world? There’s one in 10,000 companies that you would know of, and one in a thousand public companies.
These companies, the ones you might be afraid of, are not winning. They’re struggling in the same way, and Bitcoin is a lifeline to them. You could think of them as wage slaves in the same way that you are a wage slave. Everybody is working to get 10% more every year just to keep ahead of inflation. It’s just theirs is in revenue and cash flow. So, what does Bitcoin offer them? An extended lifespan. When you see a CEO and ask, ‘Are you going to adopt Bitcoin?’ and they say, ‘Why should I?’ You can say, ‘Well, it might keep your company from going bankrupt in 10 years; it might allow you to continue to do business and serve your customers for the next hundred years.’ How many companies are 100 years old? Not many.
I’ll ask you another question: how many famous educational institutions with endowments are 100 years old? Most of them, right? Why is it that universities last 100 years and companies don’t? Lack of capital, that’s why! Do you think anyone goes into business wanting it to fail? Do you think they want their company to fail in 12 years, or six years, or 25 years? No! They’re stuck in a system, a traditional system that forces this outcome.
Banks: Becoming Systematically Robust
Banks face the same issue; they want to attract and retain capital, they want to decrease risk. You could say, ‘Well, the bank is beholden to the central bank,’ but here’s another vision: what about 100,000 banks all tapped into the Bitcoin network, not worrying about the network shutting them down? When a bank joins Bitcoin, it becomes systemically robust, much more antifragile. This is a benefit to banks. They would like to find a way to do this to decrease their risk, increase their earnings, create shareholder value, and delight their clients. They have a billion customers, corporations they need to serve. All of these companies, all of these nonprofits, they all need the bank to support what they do, and in time, they will.
Nonprofits: Extending Global Reach
Nonprofits also stand to benefit. They want to raise capital, but they also have endowments; they want their endowments to appreciate by 40% a year, not just 4% a year. There’s nobody running a church, a charity, a school, that wouldn’t say they want their endowment to appreciate. Bitcoin allows them to harness technology and extend their reach globally. Bitcoin is money that’s global and has a half-life of forever. All of these endowments are using money that has a half-life of 10 years, or five years. Their property might last 20 years. Their investments are short-duration and local.
Bitcoin stretches your scope across time and space. Now, tell me, what charitable pursuit doesn’t want to do more and last forever? They all do, right? You won’t find anyone who says, ‘Well, we just want to be out of business in three years.’ So, Bitcoin is the solution for nonprofits.
Governments: Strengthening Society
For governments, traditionally, people have thought, ‘The government doesn’t like or won’t embrace Bitcoin,’ but they will embrace Bitcoin because it provides them with the financial power to thrive in the 21st century. There’s no government on Earth that doesn’t appreciate the power of money. This will allow them to lower taxes, strengthen their currencies, defend their sovereignty, improve their economies, join the global community, and delight their citizens.
If you talk to any politician, none of them will say these aren’t agenda items for them. And if you ask, ‘Could you achieve that with infinite money?’ they might say, ‘I don’t know if I could achieve it, but it would make it a lot easier.’ If you then ask, ‘How about if I took all your money away from you in five years, would that make it easier or harder?’ The answer is it would make it somewhere between hard and impossible.
A Call to Action for Bitcoin Advocacy
Now, I get to the important part of my talk. This is where you come in. ‘Ask not what Bitcoin can do for you; ask what you can do for Bitcoin!’ Bitcoin needs you. If you’re wondering why you’re here, it’s because Bitcoin needs you. My deepest hope is that when you leave, you’ll leave empowered, inspired, and enabled to do good for Bitcoin wherever you go after you leave Madeira.
I can’t stress this enough: every person you encounter is an opportunity to improve the world by gaining their support for Bitcoin. Your customers, your employees, your boss, your investors, your clients, the mayor, the coach of the team, the parents at the PTA meeting, your kids’ teachers, the doctor at the hospital, your dentist—everybody you run into is an opportunity. What we can do collectively that will make the biggest difference is to spread knowledge about Bitcoin. If you knew that drinking dirty water could kill you, you would tell the people you love to stop drinking it. If you knew antibiotics could save their life, you would share your experience with them.
I’ve got the orange pill here, and we talk about ‘orange pilling,’ but I break it down into two different cycles. First of all, everyone you meet has an intellectual perspective on Bitcoin, and they’re going to click through these five gears. The first perspective is that of a denier. They’ll say, ‘Bitcoin is a scam, it’s tulip bulbs, it doesn’t exist, it’s a ghost, a mirage, a pyramid scheme.’ I would show them a picture of all the Bitcoin miners in the world and say, ‘Look, there are hundreds and hundreds of data centers consuming more gigawatts of electricity than the US Navy. This is not a scam; this is the most powerful computer network in the world.
We want to get them from denier to skeptic. The skeptic says, ‘Okay, I get it. Bitcoin may be a good thing, but it’s too good to be true. The government’s going to ban it.’ What you then have to show them is that if the government was going to ban it, they wouldn’t be bragging about having captured three billion of it and selling it in the open market. Nor would they have approved the ETFs, nor would they be fighting over who gets jurisdiction over it. We need to move people from denier to skeptic, and then the next step we take them to is a trader.
They’ll say, ‘Okay, well, maybe I guess I might buy some, but I’ll probably sell it. I don’t know. I’ll buy it if it’s going up, I’ll sell it if I think it’s going down. I don’t have an opinion.’ That’s a step up, and then hopefully, they get to the next level, investor. They will view Bitcoin as great technology, just like Google, just like Apple, just like Microsoft, just like how water, electricity, cars, and planes are great technology. They’ll think, ‘It’s technology; it’s the future. I should invest in it. If you made a lot of money on the Magnificent 7, how do you not own Bitcoin? Do you not believe in the Magnificent 7? You think semiconductors won’t make a difference? You don’t believe in artificial intelligence?’ They undergo the same cycles.
Once we get them to Investor, the last step intellectually is that they will think that Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment. If Jack Dorsey is here, he put that in my head. Don’t get dejected if someone is actually a denier. You know who was a denier? Me! You know what I became next? A skeptic. Then, at some point, I looked and I said, “You know, the world’s kind of messed up, and interest rates are zero, and my dollars are generating zero. I’m going to buy Bitcoin!” Then I became a Trader, and after I bought the Bitcoin, I started reading a lot more and listening to a lot more podcasts, and thought about it, and I realized, “No, I should be an investor.”
When you started hearing about me, I was already at the investor stage. However, it was the collective effort of everyone in this community. Every Bitcoin podcaster, writer, and educator, that pushed me over the line to becoming a Maximalist. If you think you don’t make a difference, you’re wrong; you do make a difference! You’ll never see a gathering of people like this at an Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, or gold investor conference. This is very special.
When you’re orange pilling, you’re engaging people both intellectually and spiritually. Everyone starts as observers, those who read about Bitcoin on Twitter but don’t own any. Then they become participants, starting to buy and maybe build on it, owning perhaps 1%. Believers come next, realizing Bitcoin is the best asset. Possibly allocating 40% of their liquid portfolio to it, with the rest in their house, and thus, they invest more of their liquid wealth into Bitcoin. Eventually, some reach a hardcore stage, becoming adherents who see Bitcoin as their primary investment.
The final stage is becoming an Advocate, where it’s not just about being all-in; it’s about spreading the word to companies, charities, churches, governments, friends, and family. This process is a continuum, moving people from being deniers or observers to maximalists and advocates. It’s a collective effort to stay motivated and maintain our position in this quadrant, despite the challenges it may present.
Conclusion: Bitcoin’s Universal Appeal
I’ll leave you with this thought: Bitcoin grows stronger with every new participant, at any level. You can say whatever you want about me, just make sure to spell and say the name correctly: Bitcoin, Bitcoin.
When people criticize Bitcoin, we’re winning. When they’re uncertain about it, we’re winning. When they like it, we’re winning. And when they’re debating it, we’re winning. Bitcoin grows stronger because it represents the digital transformation of capital. What is that worth?
It’s worth half of everything in the human race. While there are other important areas like medicine, politics, and education, the digital transformation of capital, energy, and property enables every person, family, corporation, government, and movement to live their best life and achieve their greatest aspirations.
Consider an Olympic athlete who learns that, thanks to new science. They no longer need to be bled during training; they can keep their blood and oxygen. Suddenly, they believe they have a chance to win.
I want to thank everyone and conclude with the observation that Bitcoin is for everyone.
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Also read: How To Use P2P Bitcoin In A Dictatorship?
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