(Kitco News) – As concerns rise about inflation, one of the ongoing debates amongst investors is which financial asset would serve as the best long-term, store of value. Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, argues that the dominant store of value in the 21st century must be digital, and ideally, this monetary asset takes the form of the Bitcoin standard.
“You want to fix your country like Nigeria or Zimbabwe. The way you fix your country is you buy 2 billion, $3 billion worth of Bitcoin. And you issue currency back to buy the Bitcoin. That is the Bitcoin standard. And every one of your citizens stopped starving to death and they live a decent life,” Saylor told Michelle Makori, editor-in-chief of Kitco News.
Still, skeptics remain. Bill Maher, host of the political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, has recently criticized Bitcoin by saying “There is something inherently not credible about creating hundreds of billions in virtual wealth with nothing ever actually being accomplished and no actual product made or service rendered. It”s like Tinker Bell”s light. Its power source is based solely on enough children believing in it.”
Saylor responded, “Again, it’s the most disruptive technology of our lifetime. And so it’s the butt of jokes. Comedians will make fun of it. I imagine that comedians probably made jokes about planes, trains, and automobiles in their time,”
On the so called “greater fool theory” that Bitcoin skeptics prescribe to, Saylor said that skeptics dismiss the utility aspect of the financial asset in question.
“[Maher] is wrong because when the Romans pumped water into a reservoir, they didn’t put it in the reservoir because they thought a greater fool would pay them more money for the water in the future. They put it in the reservoir because they thought they might need water in the future. When you actually store food in a refrigerator, you don’t put it in the refrigerator cause you’re going to sell it to a greater fool in the future. You put in the refrigerator because you think you might be hungry in the future… So he doesn’t understand that this is really an essence storing energy for future use,” he said.
On the argument that mining Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies at large, consumes too much energy and is therefore costly for the environment, Saylor said that this concern is overblown, especially when put into perspective how much wasted energy comes from other aspects of our everyday life.
“The truth of the matter is everything on Earth uses more power than a small country. Bill Maher uses 10 times our electricity, that costs 10 times as much as the electricity used in the Bitcoin network, to enrich himself. And he’s not really thinking about it. If you take all the energy used in the Bitcoin network, it amounts to 25 basis points of all the wasted energy. So, one quarter of 1% of the wasted energy in the world offers the hope of a decent life to 8 billion people and solves an economic problem,” Saylor said.
For more details view the interview in the video above.
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