Why Bitcoin’s Price Could Go Parabolic | Michael Saylor speech

I have prepared a new presentation. A few years ago, I created One called the 21 Rules of Bitcoin. This one's the 21 Truths of Bitcoin. And preparing for this, I asked myself, what is true today in the year 2025? And perhaps what are the truths that the mainstream world, the mainstream media, traditional investors, politicians, people that are just getting familiar with bitcoin with digital assets, what is it they don't know? That seems very, very clear to me that I want to share. And so I've gathered my, my favorite 21 truths of Bitcoin today, and I'm going to start with the first. Bitcoin's an ideology. Freedom versus slavery. Innovation versus stagnation. Sovereignty versus dependency, Property versus poverty. It's a very powerful ideology. It's spreading the entire world. And there will be no bitcoin without the ideology. It's capitalism versus socialism. It's the individual versus the collective. It pops up throughout human history. We see these themes for the last thousands and thousands of years. You see these themes in the writings of the Austrian economists. You see these themes in the writings of Voltaire and the intellectuals of the 19th, the 18th, the 17th century. You even see these themes in the Constitution of the United States. The founding fathers had this ideology. And you'll see it echoing throughout bitcoin. The second truth of bitcoin is Bitcoin is protocol. Satoshi created a protocol based on that ideology. The 21 million coins, the block sizes, the 10 minute centers, the SHA 256 hashing, it was a, it was a integrated protocol. It's not the only way you could have done it. You know, you could have base 10 math, but you could have base 2 math. You could have English as a protocol, but there's also French as a protocol. Bitcoin's a protocol for prosperity. It's a protocol for economic, economic success and economic empowerment. And that protocol lives on in the software. Oftentimes people say, well, what about this, what about this quantum thing? Or what about that technology thing? And the point that I make to them is that English language is a protocol. If you have to upgrade the software, you'll probably upgrade the software, keep the language. Base 10 math is a protocol. If you have to upgrade the software, rebuild the computer, you'll probably keep the base 10 math. Bitcoin is protocol. You may change the hardware, you may change the software, you may change the nodes. The protocol is simple. A bunch of intelligent people everywhere in the world would like to keep their money forever. Once a trillion dollars Worth of money flows into that network. They'll be looking to figure out how to keep it. And then when it's 10 trillion or 100 trillion or 500 trillion, you'll have a bunch of people speaking a language of economics, a monetary language that is the Bitcoin protocol. Truth number three, Bitcoin's an asset. One of those 21 million coins pops out, a lot of people just focus on the asset. They forget the ideology. They don't really notice the protocol. They think, do I have a bitcoin or not? What kind of asset? It's the apex asset. It's better than cheese, it's better than palladium, it's better than gold, it's better than silver, copper, or land, or goats or cattle or lumber, pieces of paper that we call currency. Bitcoin is the asset, right? It is. It is the asset based upon the ideology and the protocol that results in the greatest monetary premium in the world. Truth number four, it's not just an asset. Bitcoin's a network. Bitcoin is not just a network. It's the network. It's the most powerful computer network in the world. It's a global network. It's. Without the network, you can't have the asset. The asset is stored in the network. The network is a manifestation of the protocol. The network creates decentralization, that's true, but it also creates fault tolerance, mission criticality, redundancy, and all of the other technical, economic and ethical qualities of the asset and of the movement. An ideology that spawned a protocol, resulting in an asset that circulates on a network. That would be a simple articulation of what bitcoin is. It's a truth. I would hazard to guess that the great majority of people watching the price of bitcoin don't think about all four of those things. And they don't think about this as much as they should. Bitcoin is immaculate. Truth number five. It was spawned by the immaculate conception. A nameless, faceless programmer gave it as a gift to the world. How do you create an immaculate thing? It's a God given thing. It's a natural thing. We've had it since the beginning of time. No one took beneficial claim to it. No one asserts control over it. No one. No one expects to cash in on it. The immaculate conception is an extraordinarily important thing to the network. That combined with truth number six, bitcoin is ethical. What makes something ethical, what makes it ethical, is you can take title to it, you own it. No one can Debase it. No one can take it from you. No one can corrupt, corrupted. No one can control it. It's a thing of natural beauty. No country will ever trust anything that another country can debase or control. No company will ever trust anything another company owns or controls. No person will ever trust anything controlled by another person. In order to reach this great plateau of ethical, it has to be beyond the corrupting influence of any human, any man made institution, any organization of people in the world. The immaculate conception was a necessary condition. But the engineering brilliance of Bitcoin was another condition. Right? Bitcoin, it's a perfect machine made of imperfect components. That's the brilliance of the engineering. Can you make something that can't? Can a human being make something that other humans can't corrupt? Bitcoin's ethical truth number seven. That makes Bitcoin a commodity. What is commodity? An asset without an issuer. Gold's a commodity. Corn is a commodity. Lumber is a commodity. Why is this important? Because in law, commodities have a special status. A company in the United States can be capitalized on commodities, it cannot be capitalized on securities. It's that there's actually a special carve out in corporate law for publicly traded companies. But maybe more importantly, I can stand here and I can tell you that I think the price of Bitcoin will go to 13 million over 20 years. I couldn't say that about a security. Right. You have, you have, you have a legal immunity to actually express your opinion about a commodity. That makes commodities politically superior, legally superior, ethically superior, financially superior to a non commodity, to a security. And it's not just a little bit better, it's a hundred times better. Right? And so bitcoin is a commodity. Bitcoin is actually the commodity. I studied commodities in my early professional years. Every other commodity can be created with technology, with capital, with know how. If you were going to take your family's life savings and buy a commodity to hold for a hundred years and you thought about it, would you buy soybeans or corn or oil or natural gas or lumber, coal, silver? Well, no. They're all awful. And you know why they're awful? Because it's pretty obvious to you that a hundred years ago it was harder to make those things than it is today. And if the price of oil goes to a thousand dollars a barrel, we're going to frack it, triple frack it, hyper frack it. And we'll drive the price of oil down. Same with gold. There's been hyperinflation in gold. Multiple times. You know, the California 49ers found gold. We created so much gold that we crashed the economy of Europe. Every other commodity is, is, is going to actually explode in supply with technology and with price. That makes them all garbage investments for a long term investor. They're in fact the worst possible investments as a long term store of value. The king of them, gold, still underperforms the S and P index by a factor of fit of two or more. So there's only one commodity in the history of the human race that wasn't a garbage investment. The one commodity is Bitcoin, right? A digital commodity. And let's talk a bit more about that. Why is it not garbage? Why is Bitcoin great? Bitcoin is a digital commodity. Every other commodity I can name is a physical commodity. Physical commodities are God given and anyone in the world can create them. Digital commodities were created by the brilliance of human beings. In a fluke, you needed to have agrarian engineer Satoshi give away this gift to the world. The world needed to embrace the gift. The protocol needed not to be defective. And after many, many years of not knowing whether it was something or nothing, it spontaneously monetized and came to life. It really is a miracle of the 21st century. Why is a digital commodity important? Well, you can vibrate a digital commodity 60 times a second on a computer. You can move a digital commodity at the speed of light. The AIs can decompose and recompose a digital commodity millions of times an hour simultaneously moving it and distributing it all around the world at the speed of a computer. Can't do that with palladium, can't do that with gold. There's no way Apple Computers ever going to ship an upgrade that has multifactor authentication on a physical commodity. It needs to be a digital commodity. And that's what makes Bitcoin special. Not only is it a digital commodity, it is the digital commodity. The most profound thing that happened is two weeks ago the President signed into law via the executive order Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. David Sachs said Bitcoin is an asset without an issuer, spawned by an immaculate conception. It is decentralized. We recognize it as a store of value. It is our digital goal. You have the most powerful person in the world and members of the cabinet that are saying that is the policy of the United States government, that bitcoin is the 1 digital commodity in the world that's going to ripple. And you know, I can create a digital commodity theoretically and ask that, what an issue. And I can give It a protocol that inflates it 5% every year. I could create any kind of inflationary monetary protocol. For example, corn and oil are commodities. No one doubts the fact they're commodities, but they're not scarcity, they're not hap. Bitcoin wasn't just a brilliant creation of a digital commodity. Bitcoin was brilliant because Satoshi capped the supply at 21 million. If I give you an inflation rate of 2% and the supply of gold, the economic half life of your wealth is 36 years. When I give you an inflation rate of 0% in your digital gold, the half life of your economic wealth is infinite. It is forever. The difference between 2% inflation and 0% inflation is you're dead in 36 years with 2% inflation and you live forever with 0% inflation. Next time someone tells you that it's just a little bit of inflation and the 2% doesn't matter, I just want you to think about that. The half life of 36 years versus the half life of a billion years. And of course, with that observation, it stands to reason the next truth is bitcoin truly is digital gold. Gold. What does it represent? Gold represents money and wealth in the human race 10,000 years. It represents prosperity. It represents the king commodity. It represents the most ethical, virtuous, technically sound money. And the vast majority of the people in the world, they're not invested in digital assets. They're not invested in bitcoin. They don't know what we're doing here. You're probably, you know, if you lined up 100 people on the street, you know, to say that you're the top 1% is probably an understatement, year of least ahead of 99%. So for the mainstream, when you say digital gold, what that tells them is that instead of giving away a gold medal at the Olympics, maybe it's time for a bitcoin medal at the Olympics. What it means is that the golden age will give way to the bitcoin age. What it means is a city with streets paved in gold maybe should be paved in bitcoin. What it means is that if something is gold plated, and that's how you monetize anything, and gold plated lighter, a gold plated pen, maybe it should be bitcoin plated, right? This is a very profound thing, right? The truth. Bitcoin is digital gold. We dismiss it as being kind of a boomery idea, but the boomery idea means bitcoin's worth more than 20 trillion because that's what the gold is worth. But the truth is, everything digital in our modern era is worth 10x the analog version. If bitcoin is nothing more than digital gold, bitcoin is worth $200 trillion. If it's nothing more than digital gold. But of course it is more than digital gold. Because truth number 11, Bitcoin is digital money. JP Morgan said, Gold is money. Everything else is credit money, a bearer instrument. I give it to you. I don't have it. You have it. You have the money. Well, bitcoin is money. What is everything else circulating in the Internet? Credit. What does that mean? It means that I send you something, I send you a fee of a credit card network. 45 days from now, maybe it will be transferred to your account after the credit card company takes 2%. Right? In a world of digital credit, that means that it takes four years for the money to move 40 times. And at the end of the four years, all the money's gone. In a world of digital money, it means you can move the money once a second, maybe you can move the money 60 times a second. You move the money 60 times a second for a twentieth of a penny. You still have the money. The computers are not going to think one click, one settlement every 30 days. They're not going to agree to pay 200 basis points per vibration of the money. Right? Digital money is profound. It's so profound that everybody in the business of managing money doesn't even understand what this means. When they understand what this means, then the industry is going to 100x. Bitcoin is going to go to the moon. Well, Bitcoin, if bitcoin is digital money, what else is it? Well, truth number 12, Bitcoin is perfect money. Okay, what is perfect money? If you read the writings of the Austrian economists von Mises and Hayek, they write about money, but they couldn't conceive of perfect money. Voltaire, Aristotle, Plato, they couldn't conceive of perfect money. Why? They didn't have the technology. It's kind of like asking Aristotle, tell me about clean water. Hi. You know, how do you understand clean water if you don't have a microscope and you don't understand that there are pathogens in the water. Nobody understood perfect money until Satoshi gave it to us. And that's because it was impossible to create perfect money before modern semiconductors, modern Internet, modern cryptography. So they were struggling. And you can see Hayek von Mises, they stronger with this notion. In the constitution. The founding fathers, who were pretty intelligent, said the only legal Money in this country is going to be gold and silver coin. They kind of knew this idea. A commodity in your hand, a self custody, commodity bearer instrument felt like good money. What they designated as perfect money in the Constitution. And we have drifted, you know, a little bit away from that. They designated what they saw were the hardest commodities and the most liquid fungible commodities that could be used as a monetary token. And they were never perfect because you can't practically do every transaction by swapping gold and silver coins. And because gold and silver coins aren't hard capped, they have inflation. So they had defective money that was slowly decaying. That was, that was not quite useful. But it was just, you know, they used to say it's the worst possible way to do it, except for every other way. Right? And so the significance of this truth, this basically marks the point where economics goes from being a superstition and an art form to being a scientifically based engineering discipline. You can't engineer an economic system or a monetary system before you have perfect money. It's just like trying to do good math. But two plus two equals five on Tuesday and it equals four on Wednesday. And if you don't have stable numbers, you can't do math. And if you don't have stable money, you can't do economics. You know, if you can't drink water, there's not going to kill you. Life is pretty ugly, right? This is profound truth. Again, misunderstood. No one expect no economist trained in the past hundred years. They never took a course on perfect money. They never imagined it. But you can't really blame them. It's like if you went back to Voltaire and you say, okay, that's the smartest guy in the 18th century in France and you know, he wrote shelves of books. But like, you know, poke him and say, describe, you know, radioactivity to me and how are we going to build mobile phones and satellite communications? And he would have thought, what are you talking about, right? It's like the most brilliant person. Without the instrument, the technology can't conceive of the rational thing. And that takes us to truth. 13. Bitcoin is legitimate. A short phrase, a powerful phrase. It wasn't legitimate four months ago, a year ago. If you try to remember where you were and what you were thinking in March of 2020, when the entire crypto industry was under massive onslaught, everybody's getting sued, right? And the, and the most likely future was everything gets ground into the dirt. We have completely come 180 degrees. This is the most powerful person in the world sitting in the most, at the most sacred place, the Oval Office, flanked by two cabinet members telling you, bitcoin is digital gold. A store of value, a commodity. Not just a commodity. You know, if the US seized 10,000 securities, all your artwork, all your houses, your planes, your trains, your automobiles, every currency, you know, everything of value, your diamonds, your gold brooches, your silver, they'd sell it, right? The only thing the United States does not sell is its national parks, its nuclear stockpiles. And it's Bitcoin now. That's a shockwave that will be held around, heard around the world that just happened, you know, literally days ago. It's going to take a while for that to ripple through the entire federal government. Then it will ripple through the state governments. Then it will ripple through the banking system, the insurance system, the credit rating agencies. Then it will ripple to all the banks in Mexico and El Salvador and Argentina and in Europe, it's rippling through the banks in Hong Kong and China and Japan and Abu Dhabi and Europe. How long will it take? Well, you know, how long. How long does it take for a profound good idea to move its way through layers and layers of bureaucracy? It'll take a while, but the innovators will actually grab this. And those that, those that need the money, that want the money, will reach for and embrace the money, and they will be enriched by it. And there will be others that will resist it. But that entire shockwave, right, that explosion in legitimacy that happened just a few weeks ago, happened on a Thursday night in the White House. And that's. That's profound. We are legitimate. And as I've said before, if Bitcoin's not going to zero, it's going to a million, right? It's either it's either nothing or it's something. And if it's something, then it's going up. And truth 14, Bitcoin is corporate. You know, I talked a little about, about corporate law. I'm very sensitive to it because I ran a public company for many years. We came public in 98. Every public company in the world is capitalized on one of two things. You either going to capitalize on short dated treasuries or sovereign debt, in essence, currency, or you're going to capitalize on a commodity. Well, it turns out that every commodity other than bitcoin underperforms the S and P index. It doesn't beat the cost of capital. So capitalizing upon silver or gold or palladium or oil makes no sense. There is one commodity that you can put 100% of a corporate balance sheet in. And that one commodity is a digital commodity. And that digital commodity is called bitcoin. And so what does it mean? It means that for the first time in 100 years, companies can recapitalize. And they are recapitalizing. And what does that mean? That means a company, a company starts by sweeping a little bit of excess cash and then cash flows and then it sells some equity and then it issues some debt, and then another company follows. And another company follows. Right now there's about 80 companies that are starting to buy bitcoin and there's probably 80 ETFs. We're going to see another one every week and another one every week, and pretty soon there'll be hundreds. And those hundreds become the gateways for hundreds of trillions of dollars of equity capital and fixed income capital to migrate into the entire digital assets economy. And you can see it right in front of your face. You see company like Meta Planet goes from one hotel being worth a few million dollars to being worth a billion dollars in 12 months. Where does it stop? It's not going to stop, right? If you're legitimate, you're corporate, right? You're going to see a transformation of mainstream organizations. The fifteenth truth. Bitcoin is global. Everywhere in the world I go, I meet someone and they say, well, you know, thanks. You know, thanks, because I bought a bitcoin for my daughter. You know, I bought a bitcoin for the family. We appreciate what you're doing. And you know what I say? I say thank you because I appreciate what you're doing. Bitcoin is, is global. You know, your Apple stock isn't. Your land isn't. Right. The, the artwork that you hold isn't global. Right? Bitcoin is a global asset. It means somebody in Nigeria buys it and they're getting the benefit of entrepreneurs in Manhattan. And it means someone in Arkansas buys it and they're actually in an economic relationship with somebody in Singapore. Right? This, this is not a lowest common denominator thing. You know, you own Arkansas real estate. No one's going to fish you out of that investment. You own Bitcoin, you vary it in your backyard in Arkansas and you'll wake up in 30 years and find out that someone in Tokyo or London make you rich. Right? This is, this is the global asset. There isn't another asset that trades at Wall street that is global in the way that bitcoin ends. You know, and it's not just global, it's immortal. We're stretching in time and space. Show me an asset that stretches to every part of space that truly is global Bitcoin. Now show me one that I can see into the next.