The crypto market may be taking a beating alongside traditional investments, but the bloodbath, which has seen many assets lose all their recent gains, has not dampened the enthusiasm of the bitcoin bulls.
One of Bloomberg’s top analysts, Mike McGlone, who recently said he thinks bitcoin will reach $100,000 over the next decade, tweeted on Tuesday: “#Bitcoin is a standout fixed-supply asset that should be a primary beneficiary in a period of limited potential further upside in equity and bond prices, in our view. #QE juxtaposed vs. tightening Bitcoin supply leaves adoption and demand as the top price-outlook metrics.”
Translation: The price of bitcoin is going up.
Investors don’t have to be rocket scientists to decipher McGlone’s finance jargon, but if they did, it would not be a problem for Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy.
Before he set up the highly successful business intelligence company, he graduated from MIT with a degree in aeronautics and astronautics. His career plan was to become a US Air Force fighter pilot, but a medical condition forced him to choose another direction.
What does that have to do with bitcoin?
MicroStrategy had a very large US dollar reserve, and Saylor was increasingly concerned that the policy of printing money on an unprecedented scale to cope with the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic would inevitably lead to currency devaluation, putting the future purchasing power of his Virginia-based company’s cash in serious jeopardy.
“I have a mega mega mega problem and the mega problem is I have a lot of cash and I’m watching it melt away… and I’m helped to realize I have a mega problem by this insane V-shaped recovery in the bond market and the equity market,” Saylor explains in a YouTube interview with bitcoin advocate Anthony Pompliano.
“There are 3,500 publicly traded companies and there’s $5 trillion in their treasuries and it’s all melting. At some point you have a fiduciary obligation to not lose the money. It used to be acceptable to be conservative but that was before the asset inflation rate went from 6% to 30%.”
He continues: “I dismissed commercial real estate, a market basket of equities… that stuff is just not compelling. What I want is something that might be cut in half that can go up by a factor of 10. That’s what any intelligent investor wants.”
As a rocket scientist, Saylor is, needless to say, quite good at math. After crunching the numbers, he concluded that the best option by far was bitcoin, not Ethereum or other altcoins, not traditional assets, not even gold.
He then began to discreetly shift the company’s cash reserve of $425 million into bitcoin in August, completing the transition on September 14. Saylor and many analysts say MicroStrategy’s move signals the beginning of an institutional buying spree that will likely drive the leading digital asset to new highs over the next year.
Saylor explains the rationale behind going all in on bitcoin: “The winning formula for the past 10 or 15 years has been find a digital dominant network that has dematerialized some fundamental thing. The mobile network: Apple, the information network: Google, the social network: Facebook, the retail network: Amazon…
“…You buy them when they’re $100-billion market cap. When they’re 10x bigger than the next biggest thing and they’re $100 billion, they’re probably going to crush everything.
“There’s never an example of a $100-billion monster digital network that was vanquished once it got to that dominant position. All you gotta do is see that chart and think about the dynamic and the network effect. [Bitcoin] has already won.”
Saylor warned of bitcoin’s impending demise in 2013, but the asset has greatly matured since then and he is now confident that it is here to stay.
“I’m holding it for 100 friggen’ years. I’m not the day trader guy that’s worried about it. I think that as the institutions come in and they buy bigger amounts, they’re damping the volatility,” he says.
“I think in the next 10 years you have people coming in that are moving hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of the market they’re going to tend to dampen all the volatility. If there is any, it’s just going to be to the upside.”
Saylor is so convinced of its enormous upside potential that, unlike many investors who view precious metals as assets that complement their crypto holdings in the face of systemic fiat currency debasement, he did not opt for even a small gold position.
Why not? As a store of value, gold just isn’t good enough, he says, not even close.
“Bitcoin isn’t 10x better than gold, it’s 100x, maybe it’s 1,000x better than gold.”
In a September 18 tweet, Saylor waxed lyrical about bitcoin, suggesting that he has well and truly gone down the crypto rabbit hole: “#Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.”
The tone certainly is a far cry from his 2013 tweet warning of bitcoin’s impending doom: “#Bitcoin days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling.”
Saylor joins