hope.com – @habits

Here are some news stories if you’re not familiar with Saylor’s background and recent actions:

He’s even re-directed one of his domains, hope.com, to Microstrategy’s list of curated resources to learn more about bitcoin.

NOTES below.

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Michael Saylor on the Bitcoin Audible podcast

Bitcoin is first closed energy system, monetary energy network
Try to send power from LA to Tokyo, you lose 20-40% in shipping costs or 2% per month if stored in a battery
Shipping 3K pounds of gold from NY to Tokyo would cost $250K and take a week; to send $100M in bitcoin costs $5 and one hour
Electricity was a tech platform
Penicillin probably greatest technology for mankind, extended lifespans 20 years, but gets little credit and attention
Money supply inflating 7% a year
Gold losing guaranteed 2% per year or more due to supply expansion
“There’s gonna be fracking equivalent for gold”
Inflation is a vector but CPI is an arbitrary scalar that doesn’t reflect the assets you really want (eg, a nice house, a university education)
Negative real yield on cash is 20% range this year
Long bond right now is saying, give us all your money and we’ll give you 2% back per year and at the end, return just 30-40% of your principle
Choices came down to, is it gold silver or bitcoin?
Commercial real estate, equities are too expensive
Focused on Bitcoin’s market dominance in PoW coins that are doing decentralized SoV
Believes a dominant network that dematerializes something, when it gets valued at $100B has “won”, and will go to $1T, $2T, like Apple, Amazon. In this sense Bitcoin already won
“There isn’t any winning investment strategy other than technology!”
When a company stops growing, that means their tech isn’t cutting edge anymore
Rockefeller did everything Bezos did, 100 years earlier, Bezos basically copied Rockefeller’s playbook
Stock-2-flow for bitcoin is actually infinite if you look out 100 years
Other bitcoin benefits: Liquidate anytime, audit anytime, ship anywhere anytime, now tell me how gold is gonna do that?
Looks for “paradigm shifts driven by elemental inventions”
When we used wood, we could build 2 stories; with masonry, that became 5 stories; but steel let us build 100 story buildings
“Steel is elemental to civil engineering. Take it away, all of modern architecture collapses”
“Without aluminum, there’s no aviation industry”
Rockefeller drove down energy prices by 1000x
Crypto gold is bedrock of modern digital economy
If you build your (corporate) treasury with gold, it’s like taking a voyage in a wood ship, bitcoin is a steel haul freighter

Michael Saylor on the Saifedean podcast

“A bank is a fiat miner” – Saifedean
Saylor says main reason to position bitcoin as SoV / asset like an Apple or Google stock or gold is because it won’t threaten governments, but if you market as privacy and better currency then you’re inviting regulation or banning
“Destiny of money is to be encrypted” – Saylor, fiat is easier to print and steal

Saylor on Pomp’s podcast

Microstrategy stock went from $330 to 42c after dotcom bubble
Forgot he even tweeted about bitcoin dying until the recent purchase
Would never buy 30yr bond at 2%
Maybe the longest tenured public tech co CEO
risk free rate used to be 5%!
asset inflation ~7% but now 25-30%
Microstrategy biz model got better thru covid, reduced cost structure (no travel, no conferences) and customers stuck around (govts, big biz)
Limit to how much stock buyback you can do without moving price, would take Microstrategy 4 years
Hated remote work, but adjusted now
Went thru all asset options for the $500M cash on their balance sheet:
Commercial RE isn’t fairly priced right now, impaired asset
FANG tech stocks overpriced now
Considered precious metals but bitcoin better
Wants something that can be cut in half but also go up 10x
All winning cos were tech cos in their time from Nestle to Boeing
Looked at defi and other coins but thinks bitcoin’s focus on PoW and SoV and all this energy invested means it’s got best chance
“It’s already won”; Believes $100B is this threshold after which you win
Vetted bitcoin institutional exchanges, custodians, got to know teams well, then did 1000s or more transactions every day over period of time
Confident he didn’t materially move the market, “let the market come to you”
“Every CEO had a lot of assumptions shaken this year” from TikTok to remote work to macroeconomy
Putting bitcoin in corporate treasury “It’s like the 4 minute mile”. Didn’t think it could be done, now someone has done it and next year dozens will do it
To copy his move, a nimble public co takes 6 mos to do this, a rational big public co takes 9-12 mos, expects more to follow late this year and into next
It’s not 10x better than gold, 100-1000x better
3500 publicly traded cos, $5T in their treasuries
Asset inflation went from 6-7% to 25-30% (that’s where he gets the 2-3% loss each month for holding cash), love his metaphor of melting ice cube
“There’s a negative real yield on anything else I can buy”
$200T or more of negative real yield on treasuries, precious metals, etc, bitcoin’s upside is not just gold mcap
Wonders why Dorsey with $10B between Square and Twitter doesn’t buy $500M?
Pomp believes Dorsey has more pressing problems eg, dealing with activist investors
Amazed at the community ethos of bitcoin

Some excerpts from his book, The Mobile Wave [Amazon]

Whenever teenage girls and corporate CEOs covet the same new technology, something extraordinary is happening.
-And the adult population will be impacted just as much, and perhaps more, as many physical objects we find in our pockets and purses today—like keys, wallets, credit cards, calendars, cameras, recorders, maps, and mirrors—become software, too,
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” This quote is loosely attributed to Trotsky and its idea applies to our situation today. Your business might not be interested in software, but software is interested in your business.
The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years to run its course. The Industrial Revolution required a few centuries. The Information Revolution, propelled by mobile technology will likely reshape our world on the order of decades.

Saylor’s 3 hour podcast with Peter McCormack is also great, but I didn’t take notes for it.

Oh…he also did a good long podcast on domain names with DomainSherpa:

Majored in aeronautics/astronautics, history of science
Domains: Shorter is better, easier to spell, English
Parallels to vanity phone numbers and license plates which are still an active market
By 1995 it was clear to him how valuable domains would be, bot a bunch like Angel.com and Alarm.com etc
Spent $100-200K for voice.com (me: later sold to BlockOne for $30M)
Started businesses with Alarm.com (home automation) and Strategy.com (personalized intelligence)
Missing piece is creative thing, fantastical thinking, references fantasy fiction a lot
English has most words in world (is this true?)
Enormous value to learning English, 2-3x multiplier or more in earnings
Lives in Miami Beach
In domain industry an English domain is worth 100x more than comparable in Spanish
Domain names = Commercial real estate
The commercial RE value will move to domains as world dematerializes
Virtual wave comes after mobile wave
People have rediscovered criticality of owning own domain
Thinks voice.com is actually worth $1B
Compares to art, rather own and lease or license it instead of selling the asset outright (similar to real estate, bitcoin)
“Domains are new digital asset class”
Podcast host: believes there are ~50K domain names with truly premium value (host owns pristine.com)

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Dropping this here…because, well…*shrugs*. Never a dull moment in 2020:

Tag: hope.com

Michael Saylor is a bull bull bull – a bunch of notes from his podcast appearances