This is not news. The IRS has categorized Bitcoin as property since 2014.

Wow great analysis, it sounded fishy when he said its a SoV only during the intervie, but I couldn't put my finger on it

Not sure how IRS classifications are relevant to sound money? They don’t get to decide what has good moneyness and what doesn’t, they just make up and impose tax rules on things.

That assumes he's not already acting on their behalf... What if MSTR has always been a gov front company, and Saylor has always been an asset?

I wouldn’t be surprised at all. But what difference would it make if we knew for sure he was? It doesn’t change anything about Bitcoin or the value prop of it, we already know we can’t stop our enemies from using it. I guess the arms race to stack would heat up a bit more but other than that I don’t think much would change.

Yes - I agree. It's smart & I don't begrudge him for framing Bitcoin in this way. Only a commie would expect someone to put the interests of others above their own. He knows what he's doing is a speculative attack on the dollar. I'm pretty sure he called it out as a potential strategy early on. I bet he's kicking himself for ever saying it. Governments don't want us using Bitcoin as a currency because it's too hard to track for taxation. They would prefer we stored our value in a medium that they can control but if it's not a MoE, it's less of a threat to them. At it's core it's permissionless P2P electronic cash. Nobody can stop us using it that way. It does however function better as a MoE when it's purchasing power is greater. The price is more stable & less sats are required to move the same amount of value (think lightning capacity). I'm happy to have him pump Bitcoin.

Microstrategy doesn't hold a single Bitcoin. Bitcoin is permissionless, what microstrategy holds is permissioned by the state and has neutered the entire value proposition of Bitcoin.

Microstrategy is a company and a company can’t hold Bitcoin, individuals do, so I agree with you on that. And yes they’re very much permissioned by the State - custodianship, FASB accounting, public filings etc. I very much get and concur with your opposition to corporations, they make little sense in a Bitcoin world but I’m talking from the fiat system lens. Not sure I fully agree with “neutered the entire value proposition of Bitcoin”. Certainly not for other Bitcoiners, MSTR’s use/lack thereof doesn’t affect other Users so it hasn’t neutered anything (although re my last point I can see being on the opposing side to them in future). But also NGU is part of the value prop of Bitcoin, and they’re definitely exposed to that element of it.

“Governments don't want us using Bitcoin as a currency because it's too hard to track for taxation. They would prefer we stored our value in a medium that they can control but if it's not a MoE, it's less of a threat to them.” Tax is part of it, no more GST if everything is considered “P2P” at the PoS. The bigger reason is the risk of deflation. If enough people opted out of any given fiat currency to an alternative MoE, that fiat is going to deflate and die. Governments don’t want their fiat to die because they like printing money - in a war they will say they **have** to print else they’ll get outspent and defeated and in peace time they need it to buy off the electorate. Any popular acceptance of Bitcoin or any alternative MoE is therefore an unacceptable (read existential) threat to Governments, if they can’t quash it before people adopt it then they are fukt, and these are people who only know how to operate in monopolies rather than competitive markets, they don’t want to have to innovate and service “Users”. Always thought the US was the best example of this, still using cheques and drive-thru Banks and weird shit, no chip/pin for years - it makes sense though if you think about it, what need to innovate did they really have when they have the biggest monopoly on the planet? None. Meanwhile poorer countries have adapted mobile minutes and been using QR payments for years because their money is shit so they tried to reduce friction to keep it in use as MoE.

this is the way... same goes for segwit (still!) and ANY change to code. imagine the sheer amount of war-gaming gone into bitcoin neutralization (unless, perhaps, it was created as a pressure release valve on a collapsing system by invisible hand who thoroughly understood and controlled limits of guv and other entities conjured with the abuse of the word) - any move could be a small part in a decades long strategy that no one can see until too late... or maybe its already too late to stop btc... all this maybe and unless and perhaps might mean the following: Legacy is the best way to store long term.

I mean that it neuters the value proposition of all coins held by microstrategy, they do not provide Microstrategy with any separation of money and State.

True but sort of circular logic in that the legal fiction of Microstrategy only exists of the State in the first place.

Ethereum was the result of war-gaming Bitcoin. I don’t necessarily mean Vitalik was in a war-game with US Gov operatives and they sent him out to destroy it but rather they would have deduced the best way to attack Bitcoin was to surround it with shitcoins, that are full of scams, lump it all together under “crypto” (which sounds shady to people who don’t know what cryptography is), obfuscate the zero to one invention amongst a sea of garbage and hope that it just becomes unpalatable for normies to look into. They can’t kill it now, they just want it to remain ethereal.

Why go to great lengths in trying to wack-a-mole the distributed nodes, when you can more easily wield propaganda that the normies won't even bother to question.

Interesting theory on the lack of financial innovation in the states. I just thought they were a bit slow to adopt tech (eg smart phones). You're theory makes more sense. I'm just really glad that they can't stop Bitcoin or stop me from accumulating it. I'm not really one for paying much attention to narratives. I'll spend it or sell it as I see fit. Fuck em all. 😉

🎯

#kumbaya

So you define "holding" as something that only an individual can fo and use that very definition to proof, that a company can't "hold" anything? You can define "holding" more broadly - then it can. Seems like an arbitrary game of words.

It’s not arbitrary. A company is a legal fiction endowed by the State. There is no “Microstrategy” as a physical entity in the world, you can’t walk up and punch Microstrategy in the face, and there is no entity that can hold and control the use of a Bitcoin private key - that requires agency which companies don’t have. Companies have agents who act on their behalf. Those people when acting on behalf of said company are bound by laws which if breached will either send the agents to prison, or in extreme cases see the State revoke its charter and dissolve it. This whole concept of corporations and legal fiction is only a few hundred years old.

Almost every aspect of human reality, culture and civilization is a fiction - thus I consider it completely normal, that companies are fictions.

👀 👇 View quoted note →

I dunno about Saylor either but you have to put yourself in his shoes. He's surrounded by people who are paid not to understand Bitcoin, nor money even for that matter. Bitcoin has to become to become a SOV first and the rest should happen naturally due to incentives. Real estate being a SOV is something everyone understands so comparing Bitcoin to real estate I think is an easier sell to the normies. And I agree with you NVK. Not everyone will be able to self custody nor will they want to. And Bitcoin replacing the central banks alone would be a massive step in the right direction for humanity. And I think that thanks to the Internet Bitcoin adoption will go much faster than historical norms, unless the majority fall for the CBDCs, so I think we might actually see Boomers buying groceries with sats one day and they're not gonna use Phoenix or Zeus or anything like that. I think one of the most important features of Bitcoin that doesn't get talked about enough is that L2 doesn't require a completely separate currency like gold and bonds do. This combined with a fully transparent base layer and some competition makes rehypothecation and other fuckery much more difficult and hopefully even deincentivizes it. Plus the speed and scale we can communicate with each other now showed us last spring how much faster a good ol' fashioned bank run can go lol! "All your models are broken"

And also we need to stop shaming/attacking people who don't wanna self custody. They are free and have the right to choose what custody method works for them. Everyone has different situations and risks. For example: how would you tell a blind person to self custody Bitcoin right now? Or someone with dementia and no family? What about someone who can't afford a phone? Even planning my Bitcoin inheritance for my young kids isn't as simple as I thought it would be, they're not even old enough to understand single sig yet. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and I can't come up with anything that doesn't involve a lot of trust.