Michael Saylor0:00
Hear the Bank of Shanghai is rolling out a Bitcoin ETF custody to the Bank of Shanghai. You would say that's great, that's going to give access to Bitcoin to 1.5 billion people in China. Okay, and they're going to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin is going to go up to $10 million a coin. Question: how does Bitcoin scale? And I think the answer to that question is Bitcoin scales in myriad ways. To say thousands of ways might be an understatement, maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of ways. There are 8 billion people on the planet, and every single one of them in encounters Bitcoin is going to think about how they wish to interact with Bitcoin, and they've all got a different opinion. The three-year-old that is interested in Bitcoin will have a different view than a 15-year-old, will have a different view than a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old, and an 85-year-old in China will have. And so my first experience with Bitcoin was this was a defensive treasury strategy I could use to save my company. MicroStrategy is going to continue to raise capital to buy Bitcoin. We're going to continue to engage in Bitcoin advocacy efforts to advocate Bitcoin institutional adoption for institutional investors. We're going to advocate adoption of Bitcoin by companies, both public companies and private companies. We're going to work on advocating and educating organizations. Cash App and Block will do that in the United States, but Block doesn't operate in China, and there's going to be a company in China, and they're going to think, well, maybe we'll just copy what Block does and we'll just do it in China, and that's going to work for them because the Chinese government's probably going to make it very difficult for an American company to do what American companies do in China. So then there's going to be some people that are going to say, well, I don't want to trust a company. Okay, well, you know, when you actually buy a Coldcard or you buy a Trezor or a Ledger, you're trusting a company. So what do you mean by not trust a company? Right. Well, I'm not going to trust the company to store my keys. Well, so what are you going to do? I'm going to buy one of those steel plate titanium plates and I'm going to hammer my keys on the titanium plate. Okay, well, how's that going to get shipped to you? Well, I'm going to FedEx that. You're going to trust that company, right? I'm going to put it in a bank safe deposit. That's another company, right? There's going to be a whole set of people that'll take a view that I don't trust that company, but I'll trust this or I'll trust myself. And that's going to evolve, right? I actually think how does Bitcoin scale? You know, what you're going to end up with is a set of entities that self-custody on the base layer. The OG's, you know, Bitcoin maximalists, especially the ones with large amounts of Bitcoin, and they will self-custody. Then you will see a set of Bitcoin banks. Cash App is a Bitcoin bank. Fidelity and Coinbase will be Bitcoin banks. Standard Chartered and other custodians and Anchorage, they will be Bitcoin banks. You'll probably see 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 Bitcoin banks, and they will be exchanges, custodians. They'll start to offer other services, maybe trading, maybe yield, maybe credit, or maybe just buy, sell, and custody. But you'll see them. And then you know how will it scale? You can send Bitcoin cashtag to cashtag right now, and it's instant and free, and you'll see a lot of that layer three custodial transactions going on. But when there's 50,000 or 100,000 Bitcoin banks, they will want to transact high-speed with each other, but they probably won't go to the base layer. They'll probably go to a layer two, maybe Lightning. And so you'll see a lot of layer two protocols, Lightning being the obvious one where people open up channels, and you'll see a layer three to a layer three do high frequency final settlements or settlements with a layer two. Maybe I want to do 100,000 transactions an hour in a channel system between 42,000 counterparties.
