# Last edited on 2021-04-26 05:55:53 by jstolfi

Lies by Michael Saylor in the debate by Frank Giustra.

03:00 "All bitcoin holders and all gold holders agree on sound money principles."  

03:03 "The real debate is which is the best monetary system."

03:12 "Human civilization rises through channeling energy."

03:20 "We invented fire"

03:22 "We built our cities next to rivers."

03:25 "We were channeling gravitational energy [with] the aqueducts."

03:33 "When we compress air in a cannister we are channeling pressure."

03:39 "Lasers are channeling photons."

03:44 "If we want to better the human condition we need to be able to capture, store, and channel that energy."

03:48 "Money is energy."

03:50 "Money is a store of value and is also a technology that alllows us to trade energy over time and space."

03:58 "So if we look at the history of money, we got from commodity money to coinage of those commodities to notes represented by that money to fiat currency, and now we have cryptography as the basis of money."

04:22 "If God came down and God waved his or her hand and created the idel money, it would be based on Luca Petroli's modern accounting principles of double-entry accounting."

04:36 "If you had God-like power and you could implemented a double-entry ledger like Petroli introduced in 1494, perhaps you could define 21 million units that are infinitely subdividable, trillions and trillions of time each"

04:54 "you could maintain that [ledger] in magic space"

04:57 "and then you could settle everybody's trades instantly"

05:00 "everywhere on earth"

05:02 "everywhere on the universe"

05:04 "in a fair and equitable fashion"

05:06 "that would be a good money, we could call that GodCoin"

05:11 "and GodCoin is like perfect instant transactions, never losing any information"

05:19 "The next best thing that we invented [...] is Bitcoin."

05:23 "Bitcoin is the most efficient monetary system we have yet implemented successfully"

05:26 "It is 21 quadrillion satoshis"

05:30 "350'000 transactions a day"

05:31 "it costs about 10 basis points of the monetary network to clear those transactions"

05:37 "and to secure the network"

05:39 "and it stores the value"

05:40 "and it provides security to everybody on the network"

05:44 "effectively for free after those transaction fees"

05:47 "Bitcoin is the most disruptive force of the century"

05:51 "In 12 years it grew to 1 trillion dollars in monetary value. That beats Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and the like."

05:57 "That is the market sending us a message."

06:00 "It is the next chapter in the mobile wave."

06:06 "now we are going to digitize our money"

06:09 "our currency and assets are going to flow to billions of people"

06:12 "money is collapsing"

06:14 "we have got a massive inflation problem"

06:16 "we are losing 1% of our value in currencies every single month"

06:21 "Humanity without an effective strong money is like a Type 1 diabetic without insulin:"

06:28 "[Without it] you cannot store energy, you cannot degrade fat, you are going to starve to death."

06:33 "Without delivering effective money to the human race, everybody is going to either economically freezeor starve to death."

04:40 "Violence and misery are going to follow."

06:45 "Gold is not a solution"

06:45 "It is not practical to distribute gold in small quantities to five billion people"

06:50 "Bitcoin is a solution"

06:54 "It is spreading more than 200% a year"

06:57 "We are adding 3 million users a week"

06:59 "It is accelerating"

07:01 "If I wanted to give knowledge, music, and money to the world, in the 19th century you did it with books, pianos, and gold"

07:13 "They are now antiques for the elite" 

07:15 "In the 21st century you wanna use the internet platform and bitcoin"

07:18 "and you are going to provide i-books and Google and YouTube, you are going to provide Apple music and Amazon music and Spotify to everybody"

07:29 "and you are going to provide bitcoin as an asset for everybody."

07:33 "Gold used to be the best solution"

07:36 "[Gold] isn't [the best solution] anymore"

07:39 "The time has come to pass the torch from gold to bitcoin"

07:43 "Bitcoin is humanity's first effective engineered monetary system."

07:49 "[Bitcoin] is as profound as the rail networks, our road networks, our electrical networks, our telephone networks, and the internet" 

07:56 "[Bitcoin] can and will deliver the virtues of strong money that gold idealists have long hoped for."

14:39 "You are not going to survive if you don't pick the right element. Crypto is the steel of the 21st century financial economy."

14:51 "You can counterfeit [gold]"

15:15 "[Gold] shows up in the economy in a heterogeneous fashion, lots of different types of gold coin, lots of different types of gold bars, lots of different types of gold jewelry"

15:25 "And the paper gold itselfis sometimes trading at 100:1 versus the unedrlying physical gold and there is no trusted protocol to guarantee the integrity or synchonicity between paper gold and actual gold"

15:44 "Bitcoin is just not an asset, it is a network and a protocol"

15:48 "People would say, it is the world's first "self-settled" real-time clearing bearer instrument."

15:55 "It is all those things [Giustra] mentioned [for gold]"

15:56 "It is decentralized"

15:57 "permissionless"

15:58 "global"

15:58 "immutable"

15:59 "scarce"

16:00 "auditable"

16:01 "instantly transferrable"

16:02 "not seizable"

16:03 "highly divisible"

16:09 "the asset itself, secure"

16:10 "highly divisible"

16:11 "deflationary"

16:13 "they're never gonna add more than 21 million"

16:18 "you can transfer it around the planet"

16:23 "it is transparent: everybody running a node can authenticate it instantly from a 100 dollar smartphone."

16:28 "that makes it the perfected monetary asset of the human race"

16:35 "we never actually had an asset that clean"

16:37 "it is synthetic gold"

16:39 "without de defects of monetary gold"

16:41 "the network itself is global, it is open"

16:45 "anybody can run a security node or a validating node on the network"

16:50 "It is empowering" 

16:51 "to billions and billions of people"

16:54 "it is vital because it has been continuously upgraded in the software layer"

16:58 "and [has been continuously upgraded] in the hardware layer"

17:00 "and it is viral, it is spreading at a rapid rate"

17:02 "Companies, countries, individuals are adopting this"

17:07 "That makes it anti-fragile"

17:10 "It just keeps getting better"

17:15 "The protocol is the third element of the ass[et] which makes bitcoin superior"

17:20 "What's special about that is that it is a protocol for synchronizing financial applications with integrity to the underlying bitcoin asset."

17:27 "It was built into Square, into PayPal"

17:40 "and what does that mean, it means that bitcoin is harder, it is smarter, it is faster, and it is stronger than the gold that came before it."

17:47 "Harder meaning, gold has a half-life of 30 years, you make 2% more every year."

17:50 "Bitcoin has a half-life of 'forever'."

17:54 "It is effectively immortal" 

17:56 "it is organically evolving"

17:58 "it is only going to be better in a 100 years than it is now"

18:03 "it is smarter, because the applications running on bitcoin are driven by modern software and modern CPUs and modern servers, they keep getting smarter and faster with Moore's Law"

18:14 "you can make 100 million calculations a second around the world across hundreds of thousands different servers on bitcoin applications"

18:23 "you cannot do that with gold"

18:26 "it s faster: you can do billions of transactions at the speed of light on these applications, you can run them 24/7/365"

18:34 "it is stronger: you can channel high frequency energy."

18:38 "I can flash 10'000 loans for 3 days each across a hundred jurisdictions between 10'000 different companies and fetch them back with laser-ike precision."

18:50 "Bitcoin is a trust network, allowing millions of applications to serve billions of people"

19:00 "it is going to acelerate global commerce in the 21st century"

19:07 "it is critical for allowing for safe and efficient operations in cberspace"

27:45 "PayPal and Square and Venmo are providing billion transactions instant speed of light throughput on top of bitcoin's network."

27:55 "The paymenents are going to come from the application layer, the Lightning Network."

28:09 "Holding the keys to cryptocurrency is the highest property right that the human race has ever invented to date.  We can't have stronger property rights than holding 100 million dollars with password key in your head ormulti-signature keys. Everything else is a weaker property right."

28:27 "I think that the way the world is going toend is that everybody is going to have a selection of currencies in their mobile wallet  and there are going to be the top ten currencies, the dollar will be the king currency, and they are going to use it as medium of exchange and instant payment on the network [...] as long as there are successful countries, they will maintain their currencies"

28:43: "[everybody is going to have assets in their mobile wallet], and then there will be strong assets, the strongest will be bitcoin; people will have other assets, and bitcoin does not have to be a currency to be successful"

28:57 "the losers will be the weak assets and the weak currencies, and this is not a currency war, this is an asset war"

36:52 "as soon as one country starts to buy bitcoin for their central bank, the price is going to rip."

37:01 "the US dollar is going to be the big winner from the spread of bitcoin"

37:03 "five billion people are going to have a mobile wallet on their phone"

37:06 "they are going to have a currency layer running on Lightning rails"

37:10 "or [a currency layer] running on a payment compliant layer"

37:12 "will have the US dollar, may have the euro"

37:14 "the big losers will be the countries which are going to lose their currency privileges. All the collapsing economies in Africa, in South America, and Asia, they will not keep their currencies, people will switch over to the dollar"

37:28 "Bitcoin is critical to the US technology supremacy"

37:30 "[Bitcoin is critical to] the US dollar supremacy"

37:34 "onde day five billion people will use the US dollar as currency"

37:37 "I don't think that the government is gonna fight it, I think that the government is going to embrace it."

31:41 "Will the government stand by and let bitcoin and grab gold's capital share and part of the bond market? Well they allowed the growth of the Vanguard 500 and teh S&P 500 and ETFs and bond mutual funds and gold ETFs. I think that as long as the asset sits in regulated banks and custodians they won't have a problem with insurance companies investing in bitcoin rather than an S&P 500 and index fund."

38:11 "Will there be a political pushback?  Well there is 2 to 3 million ppeople a week that are buying into bitcoin around the world."

38:19 "Coinbase added a million a week in the fisrt quarter just on their platform."

38:23 "Bitcoin is the most popular investment asset in the history of the world."

38:31 "It is the most popular in the world, it is spreading like wildfire"

38:33 "By the end of this year, more than half of the US voters will own it"

39:17 "I think that Thiel's comment [that Bitcoin is a threat to the US dollar] were misinterpreted. What he was saying is that it will be the base layer for the 21st century FinTech ecomony."

39:20 "The lieutenant governor of the China Central Bank just embraced as an asse, not as a currency, and said that under a proper regulatory regime it would be appropriate for investors to hold bitcoin."

mixing crypto and stablecoins? "Li Bo, a recently appointed deputy governor of China’s central bank, said during the Bo’Ao Asia Forum event that until the PBoC finds out what regulatory requirements it needs to prevent the speculative nature of such assets from creating serious financial stability risk it will maintain its current stance on the asset class."  https://dailyaffiliatemarketingnews.com/china-is-viewing-crypto-assets-as-investment-alternatives-according-to-a-pboc-official/ "The Chinese central bank imposed a ban on offering coins in 2017 and ordered domestic crypto exchanges to stop the fiat on and off channel for investors."

In the same sense as "my dog has embraced a bunch of fleas"

39:40 "Gold invites violence [Long list of historic wars alleged to be motivated by stealing gold]"

40:40 "The problem is you can't secure gold.  The problem goes up with the number of nodes or caches, the value of the gold in the cache"

40:50 "It is regulated" 

40:52 "You have to secure it with guns, people, steel, concrete, carbon".  

40:56 "It doesn't scale"

40:58 "If you gonna stress test it, you ask yourself this question: when I give this to five billion people, how much is it gonna cost me? Gold transportation costs don't scale, because the more transactions, the more the value of the transaction, the more jurisdictions, brings more costs, and more regulation, and you need guns, people, and carbon, and that is too expensive for those transactions."

40:24 "Gold audit won't scale, because the more nodes, the more transactions, the more cost, and the regulators get involved, it is very people-intensive, inflrequent, slow, unreliable."

40:39 "Gold transport and audit are regulated by every node jurisdiction"

41:42 "[jurisdictions that apply to gold] are corruptible"

41:44 "[jurisdictions that apply to gold] are un-competitive"

41:46 "[jurisdictions that apply to gold] are antiquated"

41:47 "[jurisdictions that apply to gold] are elitist"

41:40 "[jurisdictions that apply to gold] are outof reach for 99.9% of the population"

41:56 "The gold applications, what we call 'paper gold', they have no technical protocol with integrity, so they are all corrupted by high politication, regulation, and inflation"

42:05 "Bitcoin security, transport, and audit are pretty effectively free"

42:08 "[Bitcoin security, transport, and audit] are effective"

42:10 "[Bitcoin security, transport, and audit] are unregulated"

42:12 "[Bitcoin security, transport, and audit] are egalitarian; everyone has the same rights."

42:14 "A person with 100 dollars of bitcoin has the same security as someone with a billion dollars of bitcoin."

42:23 "There is competition to continue [to] improve the [bitcoin] services"

42:24 "[Bitcoin is] decentralized"

42:27 "The [bitcoin] security nodes are decentralized"

42:30 "[The bitcoin security nodes] are protecting the interests of the holders from local violence"

42:32 "[from] local regulation"

42:34 "and [from] local corruption" 

42:36 "It's the bitcon miner in Iceland, in the North Pole, in Siberia, in China protecting the interest of someone in Manhattan or Ontario"

42:44 "Gold's physicality and indestructible nature invite malefactors to kill you and take your property."

42:51 "Bitcoin safely stores your property in cyberspace"

42:55 "Where it cannot be seized by force"

42:58 "and that encourages peaceful negotiations rather than coercion"


  > There are only 15,860,151 addresses on the blockchain with more
  than $100 worth of BTC.   Only 6,710,226 with more than $1000.
  About 1 million addresses have 98% of all bitcoins.
  https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html
  Modern wallets generate new addresses for each transaction,
  so those 15 million addresses belong to much fewer users.
  Many people have no private wallets but own bitcoins in 
  exchanges and other "custodial wallets".  Those cannot be 
  said to be bitcoin users.
  
45:09 "Bitcoin is getting much less risky"

45:15 "In the last one year, bitcoin 693% versus 4.66% for gold."

45:24 "Its Sharp ratio is 4.7 versus .43% for gold."

45:30 "Over five years, a dollar invested in gold would yield 1.33 dollars; a dollar invested in bitcoin gives you 132 dollars."

45:40 "If you actually chose gold instead of bitcoin you lost 99% of your wealth."

45:45 "Over a decade, bitcoin is running about 190% on average every year, versus 1.65% for gold."

45:54 "And again the Sharp ratio is 4x as much."

45:58 "Let's take a century. While people know that gold was 20 dollars an ounce and now it is 1700 dollars an ounce, so you could say that it is almost  factor of 80 or 90. But when you actually risk adjust that you realize that there is actually nobody who actually got that return over the course of the century.  95% of the gold was confiscated in the last 100 years. So maybe theoretically the US government may have got that gain"

46:27 "everybody in Russia, China, every country in Europe, everybody in South America and Asia, they all lost their gold."

46:35 "so if you do a risk adjustment calculation you find that if you invested a dollar it should be worth 100 dollars but you lost all of it so you got 5 bucks, so the real risk adjusted return over a century is 1.5% per year.  It has not been any better over the last decade. It is devastating."

46:58 "Two thousand years ago gold was somthing like 80% of money.  Gold was money."

47:22 "Today the monetary value of gold is maybe 5 trillion, half of the gold supply, and the total store of value in the economy is 250 trillion. So you divide 5 trillion into 250 trillion and gold is 2% of all money."

47:28 "And over that period it came with thousands if not millions of massacres and seizures."

47:32 "People talk about bitcoin being volatile, but in the year when bitcoin went up by 693% in twelve months, here are the maxium drawdowns, if you look at the end-of-day closing price on Binance: 13%, 10%, 14%, 11%, 17%, 11%, 25% (that was the worst, on 01/26), 21%, 16%, and 12%. So in fact, in order to get a max drawdown of 25%, to get a 693% advance, it is pretty 'historic' performance."

47:11 "Bitcoin liquidity has increased by a factor of 3, well, by a factor of 10 versus normal days over the last 6 months."

48:20 "You know, we had 6.9 billion trade on binance, two days ago or a day ago.  So you are talking about 10 bilion dollars a day in the spot market."

48:28 "Gold peaked August 10th, around the time that MicroStrategy announced that we bought 250 million worth of bitcoin." 

4:35 "And I caame to this with a completely objective clean slate, I said I gotta buy gold or I gotta but bitcoin." 

48:41 "My conclusion was, if bitcoin works, gold probably won't. And if gold works, bitcoin won't."

48:50 "So, what's the difference?  Well, if I had chosen gold, I would be minus 4 billion dollars today, over 8 months, versus bitcoin. It is a 4 billion dollars choice. One is right, one is wrong."

49:04 "As everybody says, gold has a long history of manipulation by governments, bandks, and miners."

49:10 "Jim Rickards, /The New Case of Gold/, he says, 'the paper market could easly be 100 times the size of the physical market'."

49:16 "There is no doubt that we are seeing price suppression through the paper market."

49:19 "'Rigging futures s child's play'. I respect his comment."

49:26 "Bitcoin's first decade was marked by legendary volatility. There is no doubt.  But the asset matured" 

49:32 "the network has spread, it is entering its second decade." 

49:35 "It is like LeBron James at age 19.  The best player is always the mos volatile player."

49:44 "If you look forward, what you see is an extraordinary asset on an extraordinary network that solves the problem better than gold can solve the problem."

58:23 "You cannot achieve the gold's performance due to the seizure risk."

59:02 "Bitcoin is the most egalitarian [store of value] solution. You canput it in a 50 dollar android phone and you can buy it with a plus or minus 1% markup." 

59:09 "Among central bankers, it is a growing consensus that bitcoin is a digital asset, not a digital currency. That has been articulated by the Chinese Central bank, by the US, by Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve, by Cristina Lagarde at the EU central bank, and it has the merit of being true, *is* a digital asset."

59:33 "You don't buy it to use as a medium of exchange, you buy it to hold for long periods of time."