Michael Saylor is at it again!
He's ruffling more than a few feathers in the industry by essentially implying that there isn't a real need for self custody anymore. This off the heels of making claims about 5% "risk-free" yields loaning Bitcoin to banks... well needless to say people are starting to get pissed off.
https://x.com/lopp/status/1848318720541671586
Saylor makes a lot of great points.
Again I maintain the claim that Saylor has split personalities. There's the CEO businessman Saylor and the degen maximalist. The businessman has been making more appearances and it's starting to make old schoolers more than a little nervous.
Does centralized stake of institutional custodianship increase the risk of government seizure?
No I think it's the opposite, I think when the Bitcoin is held by a bunch of crypto anarchists who aren't regulated entities or acknowledge government/taxes/reporting-requirements, that increases the risk of seizure.
While this may not actually be true it is still a good point and wise exercise to engage in when it comes to adversarial thinking. A topic like this has a lot of nuance, and the way in which the question was framed was in direct reference to Executive Order 6102 and the confiscation of gold back in the World War 2 era.
Given this frame of reference the answer is somewhat appropriate. It's harder for the government to justify the mass seizure of an asset from a regulated institution that's following all the rules. This has nothing to do with individual seizures, but of course this is how crypto Xitter likes to frame it as if we are talking about a completely different topic.
Obviously your PERSONAL Bitcoin is easier to take when it sits within the coffers of an institution and is directly linked to your "slave name" (aka legal name and social security number). That absolutely is not what's being discussed here but this is how everyone in crypto is willfully getting it wrong just to make the same old point we've been making for over a decade.
Not your keys not your crypto.
How do you do fellow degens?
If you consider the Great Depression people thought their gold was safe until [Executive Order 6102]
People say that but mostly it's paranoid crypto anarchists that say that. It's a myth and a trope. First of all they didn't really seize the gold... people voluntarily turned in the gold. They did not [use lethal force] to take the gold. That NEVER happened.
Again, Saylor is correct.
This is a point I've made myself many times over:
Is the United states on the Bitcoin standard?
Maybe we will be soon! :D
But the point is we aren't.
It's totally not a reasonable comparison.
I have said this many times in my comments.
The fear of Executive Order 6102 is a complete farce and blown way out of proportion. Not only are we not on the Bitcoin Standard (fiat printed using Bitcoin reserves) but citizens willingly gave up their gold when it happened in exchange for something of "equal" value. This is confirmed by AI... for whatever that's worth.
It's very obvious that Saylor is completely in the right with this assessment. This is how plenty of rational educated people would look at the situation. Two very big factors make Bitcoin absolutely nothing like gold within this context... and we haven't even begun to explore the digital borderless nature of it that really gums up the works when it comes to confiscation.
https://x.com/ShireH0DL/status/1848337409810760062
Bipolar Manic Saylor is the best.
So people are going to post videos like this be like, "See! Look at what a hypocrite he is!" Yeah, that's not what's going on here. Saylor is a guy that knows his audience and is constantly refactoring and refining his worldview. He's willing to take both sides of an argument without question. Being able to debate both sides of an argument doesn't make you some dipshit bad actor by default. I do it all the time. It's something anyone would do if they want to truly understand a topic rather than just parroting tired rhetoric over and over again like 99% of everyone else.
LoL... degens don't care.
Yeah my feed was pretty lit today I'll give you that.
https://x.com/unchainedcom/status/1848421906996990366
"Trusting a single company"? What?
What's the single company here? Everyone knows that MSTR uses Coinbase for custody. That's two totally separate companies. I think the issue we are having here is that many assume what happened to MT GOX and FTX could happen to Coinbase. Yeah well... it can't. Coinbase institutional custodianship is a maze of hierarchies and multisig. They can't just "get hacked" and lose all their BTC. Get real.
Even if they could there are more custodians coming online to provide these same services. Soon enough Coinbase won't be the only game in town. And it's actually illegal for some of these bigger agents to hold their own BTC due to the severe consequences and security concerns when it comes to banking. You gotta license for that Bitcoin, brother?
https://x.com/hodlonaut/status/1848390345266020841
Yes, this is also absolutely correct.
But the question had nothing to do with peasants trusting the government. It was a macro discussion about the Bitcoin network as a whole. It was about institutions trusting the government. And why wouldn't the institutions that control the government not be a little more trusting of it? This is an executive of a company that's about to be listed on index funds... like of course this is the answer he's going to give because duh. This is why I thought it was comical that everyone put Saylor on the pedestal to begin with back in 2021.
There is a certain amount of decentralization within centralization.
It's all a spectrum. If Amazon.com allowed me to open a Bitcoin account I'd be willing to send several thousand dollars to them and spend directly from that account. Why? Because if Amazon becomes compromised I'm only out a couple thousand dollars, which is not an amount I'm personally going to cry about. Again, it's all relative.
Same thing goes for any other place that I shop at. I'd send $1000 worth of BTC to Target if that option existed. If I hold $1000 worth of crypto across 10 distinct corporations that's actually a pretty decentralized and safe spread when it comes to illegal theft. At that point it's the legal theft/confiscation that needs to be worried about. Begging questions like: am I allowed to make an anonymous account? Why wouldn't I be allowed? Is the government going to start forcing every business under the sun to do KYC because crypto makes people hard to track? So much to unpack there so I won't.
https://x.com/SimonDixonTwitt/status/1848388948298481756
Hm... that's interesting.
At the end of the dialog Saylor tries to make the point that "tricking" people into not trusting the banks or the institutions or the government is often accompanied by a salesman trying to sell a product like a gun or a hardware wallet. Clearly this was his weakest argument and I thought it was weird that he was pushing this angle so hard. We all tell everyone to self-custody their assets and we aren't selling anything. It's just flat out incorrect.
I think Simon Dixon is onto something here in that Saylor is projecting his own intent with this statement. He is the one that will soon be selling some kind of yield product with BTC, which circles back into the previous statements he made recently that pissed everyone off regarding letting a bank borrow your BTC for 5% yield.
https://x.com/btc_privacy/status/1848290726926262544
skateboarding on the sidewalks and listening to loud musics.
Conclusion
Is Michael Saylor a dirty FED? Honestly I'm surprised he's even willing to say stuff like this for fear of all these Bitcoin maxis pulling out of the stonk... but then again that could be exactly the reason he's saying this stuff (so that bigger players feel more comfortable bidding in size and annihilating all the shorts in play at the moment).
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what Saylor says... it matters what he actually does, which seems to be the main point that everyone is missing. Doing these thought experiments that might be wrong is completely harmless at the moment, but the crypto mob is turning on Saylor quickly. Maybe that's a good thing.
Never meet your heroes.