Michael Saylor / Tucker Carlson - FULL Bitcoin Interview - Nov 29th 2021

Thanks for having me, Tucker.

Okay, what is bitcoin? Bitcoin is the first engineered monetary system in the history of the human race, full stop. So now to explain it, the first question is what's money, the second question is what's the problem, and the third question is what's the solution. Bitcoin is the solution. Now go back to the beginning. What is money? Well, an economy consists of goods, services, and property. You know, I want you to do something for me, I want that product, I want you to manufacture something for me, I want that house, I want that land. That's half the economy. Now the question is, how do I send 37 horses to you and then how do we keep the books balanced? So you have to send me back money. Money is social economic energy. It is monetary energy, or it's the backhaul energy that we use to trade with. If I can send you 10 bushels of corn and you can send me money equal to 10 bushels of corn, then we can trade with each other. So in the history of the world, human beings have tried different monies. We've used sea shells, we used the giant stone coin of the Yap people, we used tobacco bales in pre- and colonial America, we've used copper coins, silver coins, we've used stone coins, we use glass beads in Africa. These are all types of money. Eventually we got to settle on gold and gold coins as money, but gold was never fast enough as money. How do you move 10 tons of gold from here to there? So ultimately people use ledgers, and those ledgers were issued by a merchant or they were issued by a mayor or they're issued by an emperor. You can go back 5,000 years and you can find Sumerian tablets in clay where they've etched in 37 bushels of oats in return for something. These were the ledgers. So money is that shared ledger of who owes what to whom. And a lot of times the money is a token, like a glass bead. But the problem with the glass bead is if the Africans use a glass bead and the Europeans show up and they can manufacture a million glass beads, the Europeans dump a million glass beads on the Africans, the Africans lose their homes and their livestock and all their wealth and they're impoverished. So if you have weak money and someone else has strong money, if they can manufacture the money like in the Pacific islands they use stone coins, some Europeans showed up in a ship and he realized that stone coins are rare on one island but they're very plentiful big stones on another. He sailed to the other island, picked up the stones, brought them back to the first island, enslaved everybody on the island. It was a problem. So the problem with money is how do we keep track in a fair distribution of who owns a claim to what? If there's a hundred million dollars worth of capital in the economy of products and property and corporations and the like, you have to have a hundred million dollars of money. Now if I issue a hundred million dollars of currency, it equals all the stuff in the economy. Now if I start to inflate the currency and I issue another 10 million dollars, now I've taken 10 percent of the economy and given it to my friend. That's the inflation rate. If I keep inflating the currency, if I double the amount of currency but the amount of stuff in the economy is constant, well then the price of everything that's scarce and desirable doubles. If it's not scarce and desirable it won't go up, but if there's a hundred things and there's ten times as much money, it stands to reason that the things cost ten times as much. So money is economic energy. The problem is inflation. Because in the history of the world, we have inflation when the Romans created gold coins. They start with a certain amount of gold and they would debase the currency, they'd cut the amount of gold or cut the amount of silver in the coin. And when they cut it to a small enough level, no one would take the coin anymore. So the mercenaries don't want the coin, the emperor can't pay the mercenaries, the empire topples. If I just issue you paper, whatever the paper might be, and then I triple the supply of the paper, eventually the currency collapses. So the problem with currencies in the history of time is the trust in the issuer. You're trusting an individual. You're either trusting a bank or a JP Morgan, or you're trusting a family, the Rothschilds, or you're trusting a king or prince, or you're trusting the mayor, or you're trusting a government. Now if we look at the modern era, economists like Saifedean Ammous who wrote The Bitcoin Standard, he estimates that the inflation rate in the modern era dollar-weighted is 14 percent. Think about that. For the last decade on average, all in the world we've been inflating the currency by 14 percent per year. Now it happens that that's equal to the rate at which the S&P 500 index is going up, 14 percent on average a year for 10 years running. What's the issue? Well, what is inflation? It's not really well understood. Some people think it's CPI. CPI is the rate at which a market basket of consumer goods is going up, but the government gets to pick the basket. I've noticed if I pick things like Domino's Pizza and streaming YouTube videos, they will never go up in price. I can actually adjust the basket so I just pick things that don't go up in price. The Case-Shiller index is up 27 percent year-over-year in July, so the price of that average single-family home is up 27 percent. Homes in Canada up 15 percent. The S&P index is up 34 percent this year over 12 months. What's the inflation rate? If you wanted to buy a basket of desirable stocks, the inflation rate is the S&P index. So I can calculate any inflation rate I want. Inflation is a vector. If I want to be rich, then I need to buy scarce desirable assets, so my inflation rate is the rate at which Picassos and Leonardo da Vinci paintings and stocks and property in New York City is going up in price, or a house in the Hamptons. That's a high inflation rate. If I want to be a consumer and live in my parents' basement and order Domino's Pizza and take Ubers and watch Netflix and stream YouTube, the inflation rate will be the CPI, it'll be very low. So you can have any inflation rate you want. As a practical matter, the best inflation rate for an investor or for anybody that wants to stay wealthy or be wealthy, if you're concerned about maintaining your economic purchasing power, it's the monetary inflation rate, the rate at which the supply of money is expanding. The supply of money expanded maybe 10 percent for a decade before COVID, and the S&P went up 10 percent a year. We know the money supply expanded 30 percent post-COVID, the S&P is up 34 percent. The Fed stepped on the money printer, same with the EU central bank. In the western world, in the strongest countries, we see the money supply expanding 20, 25 percent or more per year. The currency is collapsing, it's losing its value, being devalued. In weaker countries, go to Argentina, the official inflation rate is 45, the unofficial inflation rate is 85. Go to Venezuela, the inflation rate, the currency's collapsed 98, 99 percent in a year. Same in Lebanon, 90 percent currency collapse in a year. So what you have right now going on in the world is currency collapse, which we call inflation. And the mainstream view of inflation is it's only CPI and sometimes it's PCE, it's an index of things not including the highly volatile food and energy. But in what universe can you live without food and energy? But it's not really good. Common sense says if everybody tells me inflation rate is two percent or five percent, but the houses are costing 20 percent more, 15 percent more, and everything, if you talk to anybody that manufactures anything, they'll say that the prices are up 20, 25 percent year over year. So how is it I'm supposed to actually buy something? How do you buy a share of stock that went up 34 percent a year when you got a CPI adjustment of 2 or 5?

I just, first of all, if you define inflation as the CPI, you're using simple arithmetic to describe the economy. You can't describe the economy and model it with simple arithmetic any more than you could describe fluid dynamics or aerodynamics with simple arithmetic. The fluid is flowing around the airfoil, you have to have multi-dimensional algebra and vector calculus to describe a complicated phenomena. The economy is a complicated phenomena. Another way to say it is the price of everything is varying everywhere at different rates all the time. Common sense says the price of housing in the Hamptons is going up at a different rate than the price of land in Kansas. And the price in a certain jurisdiction for a certain use subject to certain regulations will go up at a different rate than another jurisdiction for another use. So the problem is inflation. Inflation is a phenomena whereby a government authority prints more currency. And why do they print more currency? Because if I want to pay a trillion dollar bill, I either have to tax you a trillion dollars or I have to print a trillion dollars of money. Turns out that it's a lot easier to print money than it is to tax people. And so it's either inflation or taxation. Throughout the history of the world, from Roman emperors before, every single coinage system, every monetary system ever established collapsed because of inflation. If you look at the history of the Sumerian states, the Persian states, the Greek states, the Roman states, Middle East, look at all the Renaissance Italian states, look at every king of England. If you just go forward, you find every one of these currencies started by issuing a coin with this much gold in it, and then I cut it and I cut it, and then I go to silver, and then I go to copper, and then I coat it with some brass or some nickel. You remember what happened in the U.S. where we used to actually have silver quarters, and now we don't because the silver was more valuable than the quarter. We're debasing the currency. So the problem is inflation.

Yep. Because if you look at all these wars, how long does a war go on? In World War I, every single nation went off the gold standard within a week of the declaration of World War I. The Germans, the French, the Brits, the Americans, we printed money. The money got debased, there was rampant inflation. Eventually after four years, you can print money for about four years before you collapse the currency, and then you don't have any means to fight the war. The Germans sued for peace because they ran out of money after four years. World War II, we ran out of money in four years. Vietnam, we paid for it with inflation. Eventually Nixon had to go off the gold standard because they printed so much money they couldn't redeem the gold, they defaulted on it. We went to the fiat standard and we just began to print more money. You'll find that throughout history. And of course, put yourself into the position of the Roman emperor or the city mayor or the noble. You have a monopoly on the coinage. You need to pay the army. You can either go to everybody that lives in your nation and take half their stuff, or you can just print twice as many coins.

Well, if you print, how would you say this? If there's a certain amount of goods and services and capital in the economy and you just keep printing money, you're not creating any more capital in the economy. You're not creating any more products, you're not creating any more buildings, you're not creating any more services. All you're doing is doubling and tripling the amount of currency. So if I just gave everybody in the United States a billion dollars and everybody went out to buy a Ferrari, would there be 250 million Ferraris? I can print the money. Look at Venezuela, look at Zimbabwe. They can print the money. You can give someone a trillion dollar note, but that doesn't create more stuff. You're just creating paper. So ultimately, that inflation works only to an extent if you can export it. And what you're doing is you're not creating anything. What you're doing is you're redistributing wealth. Like if there's 10 billion dollars in the economy and there's this much stuff, and I give a billion dollars to you, you now get 10 percent of the stuff from somebody else, which means that everybody else lost 10 percent of their stuff. As I inflate the currency, I'm actually redistributing wealth from those that store their life savings in currency or currency derivatives. In cash, if you had a million dollars in the bank 12 months ago, today it buys you 34 percent less. The S&P is up 34. You have a million dollars, if you put it in the stock market you've got 1.34 million dollars. If you hold it in cash, you've got a million dollars. If you go to buy a stock now, it costs you 34 percent more to buy the stock. If you go to buy a house in the Hamptons, it's 40 percent more to buy the house. Other things are going up in price, your cash is fixed. So it turns out that you've got some people that don't have net cash positions. If you're a sophisticated investor and you're wealthy, all of your assets are in property. You have buildings, you have companies, you have real estate, you have collectibles, you have sports franchises. If you're middle class, working class, you're working for cash, and whatever cash you've got is either sitting in the bank or you don't have a lot of net cash. So the real significance here is if the dollar loses 20 percent of its purchasing power each year, then the value of your salary is deteriorating by 20 percent a year. It's not falling at the rate of CPI inflation, it's falling at the rate of monetary inflation. The road to serfdom is working exponentially harder for currency growing exponentially weaker. That's the problem. You're a dentist, you're generating five percent more a year for a decade. I'm inflating the money supply at 20 percent a year for a decade. If you save every penny, in 10 years you'll be able to buy one quarter of what you could have bought today because the price of housing is going up at 20 percent a year and you're just not ever going to catch up. You're getting paid the currency. The only way you can actually stay ahead is to grow your cash flows faster than the rate of monetary inflation. And that's why the rate of expansion of the money supply is so critical. And there's not even a word for that other than cost of capital. The best surrogate for monetary inflation in my opinion is the S&P index, a distributed market basket of scarce desirable products. So money is energy. The problem is inflation. If we're inflating at 10 percent a year, you've got 10 pints of blood in your body. If I take a pint of blood out of your body, you lose the red blood platelets. Anybody with common sense knows you run the Boston Marathon the next day, you got a problem. You can't perform as an athlete. It takes about four to six weeks to replace the red blood cells. So when I take a pint of blood, you're not going to be able to perform for a month to two months. Now imagine if I actually took a pint of your blood every month forever. That's inflation. I'm running an economy, I'm the king. I send someone from the government and we just take a pint of blood from every one of your fighters, and then next month we do it again, and next month we do it again. What do you expect your athletic performance to be? In decline. That's the problem of a currency which is collapsing. But let me tell you, that's 10 percent. Venezuela is not 10. Zimbabwe is not 10. The Argentine peso was one peso to the dollar 20 years ago, and it's pushing toward 200 pesos to the dollar today. They've lost 95, 98, 99 percent. In a hyper-inflating economy or rapidly inflating economy, you're not losing 10 percent of your economic value a year, you're losing 20 to 25 to 30 to 40. So that's like I send some dude to the dojo to bleed you every week, and then at some point I'm sending someone to bleed you every day. And that's the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation. Not another metaphor. The currency is to the economy what your blood is to your body. And economic energy or money is to the currency what oxygen is to your blood. So common sense says if I keep sucking the oxygen out of the room, you're going to either suffocate or freeze to death. And if I keep sucking the economic energy out of the currency, the economy collapses. In the extreme, you get ripped back to the Stone Age. When the money doesn't work anymore, I have to trade you cigarettes for bullets. And the problem with that is the economy becomes a million times less efficient. If you don't have money, now how many countries in the world have a collapsed currency? 66 are dollarized. There's about 180 countries, there's 130 floating currencies. All of them are weaker than the dollar. The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency. The U.S. dollar was expanding 10 percent a year for a decade, now expanding at 14 percent a year, expanded 34 percent over the past 12 months. The dollar is weakening. It's like the oxygen's getting sucked out of the room. So Tucker, if I told you the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room and there's an oxygen mask drops out of the ceiling over there, what would you do?

Bitcoin is the oxygen mask.

The point of bitcoin is to fix the money. And money is energy, and energy is life. And if I keep sucking the energy out of the economy, I'm sucking the oxygen out of your system. Under the best case, you perform poorly. Under the worst case, I suffocate you to death or freeze you to death. That's the problem. That's why empires collapse. That's why economies collapse. And the problem is not just a problem for an individual, it's not just a problem for a family, it's a problem for every institution, it's a problem for every company, it's a problem for every city, every municipality, every government, every civilization. They all have this problem. And you can generally trace the problem to I fought a war I couldn't afford to fight, and I paid for it with money I didn't have. If you declare war on COVID, you've got a war. You declare war in Vietnam, you declare a war on fill in the blank. History is full of wars. If I had to fight them with taxes, then eventually my population would say no more, we don't want to pay the tax. If I fight them by inflating the coinage, then I get a couple years, two, three, four years before people realize it. Eventually I just collapsed the currency. So money is essential to civilization. The problem is inflation. And why does it happen? It's a natural human condition because as you have an authority that controls the money, the temptation to inflate the money supply is omnipresent and inescapable, and every civilization has suffered from it at one point in time. What is bitcoin? Well, bitcoin is the world's first engineered monetary system. And what happened is a set of engineers, nameless engineers, recoiled in horror after the great financial crisis with all the bank bailouts, and they looked and they said this just isn't fair, it isn't right. We want to create a better money. And they used two technologies: they use the internet, the idea that I could network hundreds of thousands or millions of computers, and they use cryptography, the idea that I could cryptographically sign something so that it could not be tampered with by anyone, friend or foe. And using those two technologies, they conceptualized the idea of an immutable ledger, if you will, a bank in cyberspace. What if a hundred people got together, a hundred people with money got together and they said we're going to create a bank in cyberspace, and we want to put our money there, and we don't trust each other, we don't trust the government, we don't trust any corporation, we don't even trust any one computer. So we create a program that keeps track of a ledger. 21 million coins, or shares in the bank, divisible by 100 million, called a satoshi. So 2.1 quadrillion satoshis. You don't have to know that. All you need to know is there's 21 million coin units, you can't make any more. And they wanted to create a credit so that they could send their money to each other, to anybody in the network. They could store it for a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years, forever. And they don't trust anybody. So they created this idea of bitcoin. It's an asset that's protected by cryptography and it's stored on a ledger. The software administers the ledger. The twist is we distributed the software on thousands and thousands of separate computers. Every bitcoin node is running a copy of the ledger, so everybody in the world that has their money in the bank has a copy of all the money in the bank and all the transactions since the beginning of time. So it's the immutable truth. Every 10 minutes the system batches a set of transactions and then redistributes the money based upon the instructions of the owners. If I want to send you my bitcoin, I send it and it goes to you, and every single computer in the network updates that and they all check it cryptographically using modern encryption. Now how do we defend the network? There's really three nodes of interest to make this compelling. The first node is the bitcoin node that keeps track of that ledger. It's the most secure database in the world, and it's a database of immutable truth. It's the ledger of money. The second node is a miner. It's a SHA-256 or an encrypting miner that's generating hash functions to protect the network. And there are millions of them, and they're all competing with each other to build the next block. There's only one out of two million involved in this network. It's like every miner gives you a lottery ticket, and one of the two million will get to build a block and will get paid a lot of money, like $300,000. So you don't know which one. So the miners are a wall of encrypted energy. They're converting electricity into hashes, and then inside that wall of electricity or wall of energy is the bitcoin ledger, which is distributed in a decentralized fashion. And there's one other interesting node called a lightning node. This is a layer two decentralized system. This is decentralized payments. It'll move small amounts of bitcoin at the speed of light programmatically, almost for free. So bitcoin is a decentralized piece of software. The brilliance of it is it's a bank in cyberspace that nobody controls, nobody can corrupt. It's a bank run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple, secure savings account for everybody on earth that has neither the means nor the inclination to run their own hedge fund. You have some money, you have life savings, you simply don't want to lose it. You want to put it in a bank. So bitcoin is that bank in cyberspace. These engineers came up with this idea. What are the engineers? Well, we don't know. We know some of them. They're the cypherpunks, they were into cryptography. The most important of them was Satoshi, who we don't know who it was. Satoshi wrote the white paper, created the first version of bitcoin, gave it to the rest. And initially there wasn't any money in the network. They just ran it for a year as a hobby. And then over time, there was a famous transaction where somebody bought a pizza for like 10,000 bitcoin. One pizza. And that was the first transaction. And then the network gradually began to monetize as people bought into the network. And so it was like a fire in cyberspace.

No, I don't think we should be nervous. We should be joyful because for bitcoin to work, it needs to be money of the people. It needs to be not controlled by any individual. It needs to be not under the thumb of a founder or corporation or one strong holder. The most important thing Satoshi did was he created this gift, he gave it to the world. I assume he, some people think she, some people think it's multiple people, but Satoshi gave this gift to the world and disappeared. And Satoshi mined about a million coins getting it started, but those coins never moved. They've never been moved. Satoshi's never appeared again. And then the network was in essence a community development all around the world for the next decade. And it's simply grown from a million dollars in the bank to 10 million, to 100 million, to a billion, to 10 billion, to 100 billion. In March of 2020, it was about 180 billion dollars in this network. And that's where I got involved. I was late. But when I got involved, what I saw was an engineered monetary asset, a digital gold if you will, sitting on an open, big tech monetary network. And I said this is an economic imperative because this solves the problem of inflation for a corporation with lots of cash. I had a lot of cash and I thought I was going to lose all of it if I didn't invest in something. And I said it is also a moral imperative. This is a technology to give property rights to eight billion people on the planet that don't have property rights. Bitcoin is the highest form of property the human race has ever invented. And I'll explain why in a second. There's two billion people that don't have a bank. You can give everybody on the planet a bank and property rights that cannot be corrupted and cannot be inflated and confiscated. You can give it to them for the price of a free download on Android. If you got a $50 phone and you can download some software, you can have your own bank, your own property rights, your own economic freedom and economic empowerment. So it's a moral imperative. And then finally, it's a technical imperative. You're talking about the digital transformation of everything else. The digital transformation of property, of gold, of banks, the digital transformation of war, the digital transformation of government, of security. It's a deep idea. But in essence, if the economy's got 500 trillion dollars worth of property and corporations and stuff in it, well, digital property is capital, is money. It's worth half of everything. And we never figured out how to digitally transform money or digitally transform capital. We did digitally transform photos and videos and education and books and relationships and communications. And the secret to success of Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook is the digital transformation of entertainment and education and communications. But think about what it means to digitally transform 10 trillion dollars of gold or a 100 trillion dollars of property or 100 trillion dollars of currency. So these engineers wanted to solve that problem. And of course, here's the big idea. One is it was engineered to be a digital gold with none of gold's defects. 21 million coins, but you can't make any more. The problem with gold is gold miners inflate the gold supply, and gold bankers inflate the gold paper supply. They dump gold derivatives on the market. With every other asset on earth, anything else you can own, houses, gold, silver, commodities, stocks, bonds, when the price goes up, the supply increases. If I increase the supply of any stock by a factor of 10, the company issues more stock. If I buy all the bonds, the price of bonds go up, people issue more bonds. If I drive up the price of gold by a factor of 10, people print more gold or mine more gold. Bitcoin is the only thing in the world that's inelastic to price. If the price of bitcoin triples, you can't make any more. If the price goes up by a factor of a million, you can't make any more. Now let me give you one more engineering insight. In engineering, there's something called conservation of energy. The whole point of conservation of energy is energy can neither be made nor destroyed, there must be conservation of it. The mathematical metaphor and mathematical analogy to that is proper math: 10 plus 10 equals 20, 2 plus 2 equals 4. If 10 plus 10 ever starts equaling 18, you've got a problem. If you have a bathtub and there's a leak, if you have a swimming pool with a leak, if I have an electric system with a short circuit, if I have a leak in my engineering system, nothing works. Nothing in the world of ocean engineering, aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering, nothing works unless you respect conservation of energy. The problem with inflation is inflation does not respect conservation of energy. I've got a leak in the system. I've designed a currency which is not conservative. So properly understood, if you said I want a conservative money supply, a conservative money supply would be there's 10 billion dollars in the economy and nobody prints anymore. And that's the Austrian economic sound money principle. Bitcoin is a conservative monetary system. It's the first system that respects the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of physics and laws of math, which means it is true and pure, has integrity. If you have integrity, if you have something which is true and pure and you have durability, then you can build a family around it, a life around it, a company around it, our civilization around it. Steel is concentrated energy in metallic form. You ever walk in a steel plant and you look at the energy going into steel refining? It's concentrated energy. The history of the human race is the civilization that channels energy most effectively always wins. Steel trumps iron, iron trumps bronze, bronze trumps rocks. Bows and arrows trump the guy with the spear. The guy with the spear beats the guy with the knife. It's always a matter. If you have air power, you beat land power. Sea power beats the army. And nuclear power trumps everybody. And so if I have steel, I have concentrated metallic energy. I can create a skyscraper punched up 100 stories in New York. How long will it last? 100 years. How long will a steel ship last? Longer than you will, as long as it doesn't corrode. Wooden ships not so much, wooden ships rot. You want to build a building and punch it up against gravity and hold it a hundred years, you need concentrated energy. If you want to build a trust fund that'll last a hundred years, how do you save a hundred thousand dollars for a hundred years and give it to your great grandkids? Put it in the U.S. dollar, you lose 99 percent of your economic energy, maybe 99.5. You put it in gold, gold supply doubles every 30 years, the gold bankers keep inflating the gold, maybe you lose 90 percent of your economic energy. But that would be a lucky happenstance because just about every country on earth seizes gold from their citizens. The last hundred years, everybody, even the U.S., they take your gold. So you want to save money for a hundred years, you can't do it with the currency. You can't do it with gold. Which company is going to be around 100 years? You want to put $100,000 into real estate in Florida? Can you buy a $100,000 property? Let's say you could. Two percent tax, four percent maintenance fee. Four percent of a hundred thousand is four thousand dollars a year. Half-life. Your money's not going to last a hundred years. How do I preserve my property, which is economic energy, which is capital, which is money? How do I preserve that? I need something harder, more durable. I need a steel, I need an economic steel. Steel is concentrated metallic energy. Bitcoin is concentrated digital energy. It's energy in digital form. It's vacuum packed food. It's something sitting in orbit. I eliminated the friction on energy. What's the half-life of energy? If I take a megawatt of power and I sell it at 12 cents a kilowatt hour, I have about a million bucks. I give you a million dollars of electricity. How long can you hold it in a battery? You lose two percent a month, and you can't hold it very long. You're going to lose 20, 24 percent depletion rate in a battery of electricity. How do you send a million dollars of electricity from New York to Tokyo? You can't. You can send electricity 500 miles over a power line, you'll lose 6 percent. Send it 10 times, you'll lose 60 percent. It doesn't move. Convert that electricity into digital energy, a la bitcoin, you upgrade it. If you were to convert a megawatt of power via a bitcoin miner into bitcoin, you'd have about five million dollars worth of bitcoin. You can hold it forever. You can send it to Tokyo for a nickel. You can put it in a trust fund. Bitcoin's going up 170 percent a year for a decade. The S&P 500 index is going up 14 percent a year on average for a decade. Gold is flat. It's not going anywhere. It's getting demonetized. It's a dead rock in a basement. It's not fast enough. You can't put gold on an iPhone. Gold's getting depleted, inflated, and manipulated away by the bankers and the miners. So bitcoin is simply pure economic energy. These engineers, Satoshi and all of Satoshi's compatriots, what they did is created an engineered monetary asset on an open, permissionless network that anybody could participate in, any country, any company, any individual. You don't need a bank, you don't need to ask permission. It is the ultimate egalitarian system. If you want to give property rights to everybody in Africa, in South America, even in the face of a hostile regime, you can do it with a fifty dollar Android phone and a simple download.

One more metaphor. If you can't store property, if you have no property rights, that means you can't store economic energy. If I took away every dime from your family and you got up tomorrow, you'd be worried. You'd lose your job, you're going to go hungry. You need money. You've got a bank, you're in the western world, you have western privilege. Lucky you, you have stocks. If you have stocks, they go up 34 percent a year. Maybe you're keeping ahead of the inflation rate. If I take away your stocks and you have to store in currency, well now you can't stay ahead. If I take away your bank, you can't even have the currency. What if the dollar is not the worst currency? The dollar is the best currency. If I put you in Zimbabwe, it's much worse. If you're in Argentina, you lost 40 to 60 percent of your purchasing power this year. If you're in Venezuela, much worse. So what does it mean to not have property rights and to not have a strong currency? It's like being a type 1 diabetic. If you're type 1 diabetic, you can't form insulin. Insulin converts excess nutritional energy into fat. Fat is an organic battery. Fat will keep you alive 90 days without food. If you can't form fat, you can eat continuously non-stop and you will starve to death. So diabetes before insulin was invented was a death sentence. If you live in a country with a collapsed currency, you're a di-economic diabetic. In the two weeks after you lose your job, you can't feed your family, you can't feed yourself, you can't plan for the future. So now we're back to what's the basis of civilization and what's the basis of virtue in a society? You got to be able to plan for the future. You got to look out 10 years and believe that you can provide for your family. What's the point of investing in something if you think that everything's going to hell in five years or ten years? How did I get into bitcoin? I had a company with 500 million dollars in cash earning zero percent interest. I heard the bankers say we're not even thinking about thinking about raising interest rates. I saw a K-shaped recovery where everybody on Wall Street got 30 percent richer doing nothing in a year where everybody on Main Street had to work 30 percent harder to stay still. That's what I saw last year. If you're on Wall Street with a billion dollars, you ended the year with a billion three. If you're on Main Street working for a living selling something by the sweat of your brow, you had to raise your prices 30 percent, working harder in order to generate 30 percent more money to buy the same thing you could have bought before the crisis. What I saw was 2,000 people in my company working hard doing 100,000 things right every year could make 50 million dollars. And the money in the bank was going to lose 100 million dollars a year in value doing nothing. And we were running as hard as we could and going backwards. That's the problem. It's like you're in a rowboat, you're going across the water, and the wind starts blowing in your face. And now you're getting blown backwards. You're going to row harder. The wind is the monetary inflation rate. When it's at 10 percent, wind is hard. When it got to 20, who can grow their cash flows 25 percent a year? Who can do it? A monopoly, a digital tech monopoly might, but nobody else can. Dentists can't, doctors can't, normal people can't, normal companies can't. So the wind starts blowing double and triple in your face. You're rowing, you're not going to get across the Atlantic. You're going to die on that rowboat. So what do you do? Turn the boat around, put up a sail, sail with the wind. That's what I did. So let me give you an economic short story here. The company's worth a billion dollars. This is MicroStrategy. We've got a 500 million dollar software company that generates 50, 75 million dollars a year in cash flow. We have 500 million dollars in the bank. We're valued at one times revenue plus the cash. And the cash is going to lose 20, 30 percent of its value. So I'm looking at losing 100 million dollars a year, 150 million, doing nothing. Just sitting there doing nothing. Well, so what do I do? I said well, I'm going to buy something. So I went and I bought bitcoin. I bought 250 million dollars worth of it. And then I offered to buy back 250 million dollars in my stock because if my shareholders didn't like the idea, I figured I'll buy them out at a premium. After the buyback, I had another 175 million dollars left. I bought more bitcoin. We had 425 million dollars of bitcoin. When I started this journey, Tucker, the stock was 120 a share. We bought out our limited partners, we bought our shares at 140 a share that didn't like the idea. The stock traded up, bitcoin traded up. We doubled our initial investment. The stock kept going up. And then I looked and I said I'm just going to borrow money. I went and I borrowed 650 million dollars at 75 basis points in the capital market. I issued a convertible bond. I bought the bitcoin at 19,000. The stock kept trading up, bitcoin kept trading up. We made billions at that point. I went back to the market, I borrowed a billion dollars at zero percent interest because why wouldn't you? And if the money supply is expanding at 25 percent a year and you can borrow money at zero percent interest, all you got to do is buy something which is scarce. So I bought a billion dollars of bitcoin. I issued a billion dollar bond. To make a long story short, we ended up borrowing 2.2 billion dollars at one and a half percent interest. We bought the bitcoin. Bitcoin has hit an all-time high. We now have about seven and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin. We've made about a four billion dollar investment profit on it. The stock went from 120 to 850. We generated about eight billion dollars in shareholder value in 12 months.

It's complicated when you're a public trading company. Can't even imagine. But you know, so now what are we? We're a 500 million dollar software company generating maybe 80 to 100 million dollars a year in cash flow, growing zero to 10 percent a year, with a seven and a half to eight billion dollar endowment that's growing 170 percent a year. But you know, it's like, why not? So now, if you're a university, you want an endowment. And now we can do what we want.

When we started down this journey, we were looking for digital gold. We're looking for engineered perfect gold that you can move at the speed of light and program on a computer. And the theoretical answer to that is a crypto asset that's got a fixed supply that's secure. So we went on this search, and there are 10,000 cryptos, Tucker. We had to look: is it bitcoin? Is it bitcoin cash? Is it one of the clones? Is it dogecoin? Fill in the blank. We applied the MicroStrategy test. It's a three-part test: will it be banned? Will it be hacked? Can it be copied? If you can duplicate it 18,000 times, then it's not scarce and it's not unique. It's not the dominant one. And if it gets banned, that's no good for us. And if it gets hacked, that's no good for us. So first of all, how can you know the answer to this from the engineering itself? Well, you can't. If the year is 2009 or 2010, you don't really know whether it'll be banned, copied, or hacked. There's a lot of uncertainty. We started on our quest in 2020. So in 2020, we had 12 years of history. So what did we see? Well, by 2020, the system had been attacked thousands and thousands of times, but no one had hacked it. So we had 180 billion dollars sitting in a network that no one could figure out how to hack. No one ever hacked it. People, by the way, people will hack the banks around it or the wallets around it, but not the underlying network. So we had 12 years of no hacking incident, and very good reason to believe it won't be hacked because it is the most secure database in the world. And why is it the most secure? Because the way it works is you have to run a SHA-256 ASIC miner. It's a very special purpose computer. That computer only does one thing: it protects bitcoin. That's all it can do. It can't stream video, it can't process for AWS. That network is millions of times more efficient at generating crypto hashes that defend the bitcoin network. It's a special purpose thing, seven generations. If you turned all of the AWS network or the Azure network against it, it wouldn't make a dent. Because this is a very special purpose piece of hardware. So the technology that's used to secure the network is called proof of work. And proof of work is I pour a lot of energy into the network and I run it through an encryption algorithm, and that's a SHA-256 hash generator. And the combination of those two things with the protocol means that the dominant crypto asset proof of work network will always be the most secure one, and everyone will always defect from the weaker one to the stronger one. So we saw that it hadn't been hacked. There's no way to finesse it. No matter what you do, because it really is a brute force crypt wall of encrypted energy. If you want to attack the network and even try to meddle with one block, you have to throw 10 billion dollars of capital equipment at it, and it'll probably take you two to four years to get ready to do that.

So that gets to the question of will it be banned. By the way, it can't be hacked for what I said. It can't be copied because you've got to come up with the same 10 billion dollars worth of energy and special purpose hardware. And if you had that much energy and hardware, you'd be getting paid 10 billion a year to use it to protect bitcoin, or get paid zero to try to copy it. So it doesn't make any sense to try to copy it. It's like the dominant monetary network. Like Google and Facebook are also dominant networks. Once you get to that dominant position, it's obscenely difficult. Coming back to the banning, there's a kind of misnomer. People often call it cryptocurrencies, currencies, but it's not a currency. It's an asset. It's a crypto asset. So you're right, Tucker, if the government thought it was a currency and if it competed with the U.S. dollar or other currencies, then they would take offense and they would suppress it. But on the other hand, if it's viewed as an asset which competes with gold or with index funds or with bonds or property or real estate, just a store of value or silver, then you can hold S&P index funds and bonds and you can own land and you can own property. The government would simply like you to disclose when you sell it to someone else at a profit and pay your taxes on it, a capital gains tax. And if you wanted to wire a hundred million dollars worth of property to someone else, they probably want you to disclose that per the AML/KYC, anti-money laundering. It can be owned anonymously, except as a practical matter, if you want to acquire large sums of it, you have to acquire them on registered exchanges. So you'd be going to an institutional grade custodian which is licensed. So what you see, maybe you get to a very important point. The government is regulated where it is allowed, and it's allowed everywhere except there's some noise in China. China is a different situation. In the western world, the regulations are you can hold this as long as you disclose it via a regulated entity. So you're buying it through a registered exchange, and then when you transfer it, you're subject to IRS tax. You have to pay capital gains tax.

If you look at the past week, the Treasury, the SEC, the CFTC, Congress, and the Senate are engaged in an enthusiastic dialogue about what kind of regulations will be applied to the transfer and to the utilization of crypto assets. But the most important, for example, if you issue a crypto asset which looks like a security, like Mikey Coin, if I create Mikey Coin and I keep half of it and I issue the rest and I market it, it looks more like a security or a stock. That's going to fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC most likely. If it looks like there's a set of crypto assets called stablecoins that look like U.S. dollars, the President's Working Committee about a week ago suggested that only FDIC approved banks should issue stablecoins. They want anybody issuing stablecoins to be FDIC approved, insured, licensed. So there is regulation coming into the space. Ultimately, I think that the security tokens will be under pressure, the stablecoins will be treated like money markets in cyberspace, and probably we're rotating from the crypto entrepreneurs to the institutional publicly traded institutions, large banks, etc. Bitcoin, what it was going to be was a question until 2014 when the IRS designated it as property. You're either property or your currency. In an inflationary environment, money decomposes into currency and into an asset component or property component. The currency is a medium of exchange that you can transmit without incurring a tax obligation. I give you a million dollars worth of dollars, you hold it for a year, you give it to her, there's no tax bill. It's just a stable medium exchange. On the other hand, I give you a million dollars of bitcoin, you hold it for a year, you give a million dollars of bitcoin to her, and if the price doubled, then you owe a $500,000 tax on $500,000 of capital gain. In that case, you transferred a million dollars of bitcoin with a basis of $500,000, a capital gain of $500,000. You owe capital gains when you transfer.

I think right now in the U.S. and all the institutional custodians I know of, if you go above $10,000, which is the AML limit for most banks, they're required to disclose that. So we're moving to the point where if you're transferring property, like if you wired me a million dollars of Apple stock, your bank, there'd be a tax bill on that for sure. If you wire me a million dollars of bitcoin through any kind of institutional exchange, there's a tax. It's impossible to buy and sell bitcoin outside of institutional exchanges. There are peer-to-peer networks, and there's a lot of back and forth over whether or not those are allowed or not, and it varies by jurisdiction. So I think that that's going to get regulated and is regulated differently in every jurisdiction. Generally, the scurrying is what's the regulation around tax, transfer, disclosure, anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism disclosures. Is the disclosure none at all? Is the disclosure above $10,000? Is the disclosure $600? And so all of the sparks are around how much economic freedom, and they have different impact for example.

Yeah. I'm sorry, it's above my pay grade. Sorry, all above my pay grade. Right now, here's my key point. You're a family, you're an institutional investor, you're a corporation. You see inflation. You either buy some land, you buy some stocks, you buy a bunch of gold, or you buy bitcoin. Why would you buy the bitcoin? Because you want the apex asset. You don't want the dilution of gold, you don't want the dilution of stocks, you don't want the property tax on property, you don't want the maintenance headache of property. All other forms of property can be impaired, confiscated, inflated away. All other forms of property, you have rental buildings in New York City and there's a rent control and you can't evict your tenants and there's a property tax. It's hard to sell it, and you've got to maintain it. So all other properties come with maintenance costs, they come with risk. The idea of bitcoin is digital property. It's digital gold, digital property, digital money, digital energy. The idea is let's create something pure. It's better gold than gold because a billion dollars of it is weightless, moves at the speed of light for free, and I can hold it in my head. It's better property than property because there's no maintenance cost and I can't seize it from you. It's better money because for the same reason, it moves at the speed of light, it's programmable. Try to send money on a Saturday afternoon. Try to send a currency on a Saturday afternoon from a bank here to a bank in France or a bank in Nigeria. Can't do it. So it's not spoils of war, it's spoils of peace. This is another big idea I want to make. With everything else, if we monetize, if we have a bunch of money, if I give you a million dollars and I tell you go buy stuff with it, and you buy gold jewelry and a house and a car and whatever, and I want it, I put a gun to your head, give me your stuff, Tucker. And you say no, I shoot you and take your stuff. There's nothing in this world that you can own that I can't take with force, except bitcoin. If you take the million dollars and you buy bitcoin and you take personal custody of it and you own the keys, the keys password is in your head. I hold the gun to your head, give me your bitcoin. You can say no. Now I can still shoot you in the head, but I don't get the property. You see, you can take it. This is the only property in the history of mankind, Tucker, you can take to the grave. The pharaohs wanted to take their gold with them to the grave. They created these pyramids to bury themselves with gold, but grave diggers, grave robbers steal the gold. You can't take anything else with you, but you can take the password in your head. Why is that significant? You study the history of the Jews in the 30s in Nazi Germany, and most of them left with if they were lucky ten percent of their assets. They would have left with all their assets if their assets were in bitcoin. They couldn't move their house, they can't move a building, you can't haul the gold. Maybe you try to smuggle diamonds, not very good store of value. It's the history of every diaspora, every people. When you leave, when the Jews got driven out of Spain in 1492 during the Inquisition, it was all over property. They were stealing their property. So what are property rights? Property rights is you can own stuff and no one can take it away from you. I had a million dollars in a bank in Argentina 20 years ago. It was in U.S. dollars. The peso was one to the dollar. The Argentine government sent a memo to the banks, forcibly converted everybody's dollars to pesos, and then forcibly devalued the peso ten for one. And I woke up the next morning with a hundred thousand dollars. I had a million dollars a day before. They stole 90 percent of all the currency from everybody in the country overnight on a fax, without a law, without an army. Now how hard would it be to take all of the property of everybody in the country with bitcoin? You have to go arrest 60 million people, sweat them all into jail for 90 days. How do you arrest 60 million people or sweat them in jail for 90 days? It's a billion times harder. So bitcoin is property rights properly understood. And that is an important economic empowerment. It's a protection of individual liberties. It's John Locke's dream: life, liberty, and property. Go west, young man. Why people come to America? Because if you were Catholic in northern Europe, they took your land and property. If you're Protestant in southern Europe, they took your land and property. If you're a Jewish person everywhere, they're always taking your land and property. Everybody went to America so that they could actually have freedom and have property and no one would take it at the point of a gun. And they kept moving west. Bitcoin is moving your property into cyberspace where it's protected by a wall of encrypted energy against those that would do you harm. And because it's the hardest to tax and it's the hardest to steal and it's the hardest to confiscate, it makes it the last thing in the world you're gonna attack. The path of least resistance. When it's time for me to tax property in California, I'm gonna put a tax on the building. Buildings don't move. If I put a two percent tax on the bitcoin, the bitcoin's moving to Wyoming. If I put a two percent tax in Wyoming, it's moving to whatever state in the union that didn't tax it. And when the entire country taxes it, it's moving to Monaco. And if everybody in Monaco taxed it, I can sell it to someone in China. It's universally desirable, scarce property, hard to steal. You can sell it, you can put a lien on it, you can mortgage it, you can develop it, you can protect it. And if your choice was take all your money and invest it in buildings in the city of your choice, or invest it in a company or securities, or invest it in collectibles, all those things are subject to expropriation, confiscation, inflation, taxation. This is the first time we kind of solved the problem. So it doesn't make sense as long as it's secure and can't be copied. And we had to wait 12 years. 10,000 times people tried to copy it, they all failed. Was it hacked? No. Will it be banned? Well, here's the thing that's happened in the last 12 months, Tucker. The IRS said it's property. It's important for it to be property, not currency. Currency is the provenance of the government. Every powerful government will have a currency. Every weak government will have a collapsing currency. And every failed government will lose their currency privileges. Hence, 66 countries dollarized. There's going to be collapse. 100 countries will probably lose their currency privileges. Eventually you got the CNY, the USD, a few powerful second level currencies. And then name one currency in Africa that you would rather hold than the dollar. There's just one. Name one currency in South America you'd rather hold than the dollar. There isn't one. Why hasn't the dollar spread to everybody's iPhone and Android phone? They're waiting for the crypto rails. At the point that I can download a mobile app, load it up with $87, every other currency in the world starts to collapse into the U.S. dollar, assuming the United States embraces it. So why has the United States embraced it? The United States has embraced it. Why has the Chinese nation been a bit skittish about it? Well, China's got a wall, and behind that wall they have capital controls. They don't want capital to flow freely. A Chinese citizen can't take a million dollars out of China. They just can't. Behind that wall, they block Google, they block Facebook, they bought Twitter, they blocked the free flow of capital. That's how they control their system. They print Chinese currency. If there was a free flow of capital, all the current capital would leave China. They have a problem. So they've got their system. And in the west, we've got a western system where we allow Google and Twitter and Facebook. And the western system is based on the English language, western values, generally western law, U.S. dollar, bitcoin. In the last year, the U.S. has embraced bitcoin. The Chinese have rejected bitcoin. At this point, you have Jerome Powell saying this is an asset, it's not a currency, it's an asset. You have Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, saying this is an asset, it's a scarce speculative asset. They say it's speculative. Of course it's speculative. If it wasn't speculative, then 100 trillion dollars would flow into it. It would have grown by a factor of 100 by now. There has to be some risk. It's a speculative store of value. Christine Lagarde says it's an asset. Even the bankers, when they're criticizing, they say it's not a currency, it's not a medium of exchange. You're right, it doesn't need to be a medium of exchange. You don't need to replace the U.S. dollar in the western world to fix things. What you need to do is give people a savings account. I want to hold one month of my salary in dollars. I want to store everything else for the next 10 years or 100 years in an asset which is going up in value. So if you look at what's happened, the administration's in favor of this. This is a broadly bipartisan thing. Cynthia Lummis stood up on the floor of the Senate and said thank God for bitcoin. Bitcoin is sound money. It's sound money to the right, it's sound money to the left. Who doesn't want to economically empower everybody on earth? It's good for everybody in the world. There's broad support in the Senate, there's bipartisan support in the Senate and broad support in the House. There's broad support in the administration. People were a bit confused that it might be a currency and was going to replace the dollar, and if so then that's an existential problem. But once you take that turn, you say this is not a problem for the dollar. This is us replacing the foundation of the economy that currently rests on other fiat assets which are imperfect and inefficient. The first thing that collapses is gold. Gold has been collapsing for a decade. It goes down four percent in the most inflationary year of our business career. It's down four percent. Bitcoin's up 340 percent. Tucker, what's bitcoin trading at right now?

Last question. If you had to call it, how high do you think in the next five years bitcoin could get? This is per coin. But you know, bitcoin is going up forever because it's a cap supply of 21 million and it's going to go up because of inflation. We're going to increase the supply of dollars and bitcoin is going to be fixed. So in dollars, it goes up. It's going to go up because of technical utility. We're going to build it into iPhones and Android phones and put it into every computer and move it at the speed of light and build it into Twitter and Square and PayPal and the like. So that'll cause it to go up. It's going to go up for adoption. More and more people are going to bring their money. And it's not like Facebook. It's not like when Rupert Murdoch showed up at Facebook, he didn't bring a billion friends. When a billionaire joins a monetary network, they bring a billion dollars. So when a hundred billionaires show up, they bring hundreds of billions of dollars. When companies, when institutional investors show up, they bring massive amounts of capital. So it will keep going up with adoption, utility, and inflation. And eventually it will replace gold, which is a 10 trillion dollar asset. Bitcoin's like a 1.2. It'll go by a factor of 10. And in three to five years, it'll certainly replace gold. Then it will replace indexes, the S&P index or bond indexes. It'll start to demonetize fixed income and equity indexes that are used as a store of value. Because right now people want to save their money for a long period of time, they use that. And gradually it'll demonetize property. Like in Canada, they've got a housing shortage because foreigners go and they buy the houses as an investment, and the locals can't afford a house.

We're monetizing houses. That is to say, if I print infinite money, the price of all, I go and I buy something tangible with the money before it devalues. The problem is people that are starting their career that need to buy a house can't afford to buy. So you don't want to monetize something with utility. You monetize food, everybody starves. You monetize houses, everybody's out on the street. So what bitcoin is doing is it's demonetizing commercial and residential real estate. If you were to shut down, if the U.S. government decided no more bitcoin, what would happen in residential real estate markets? Well, if bitcoin went away, then the other monetary assets would monetize a bit more. But bitcoin is 1 trillion out of 500 trillion in stuff out there, so it's still less than one percent. But gold would get a slight boost. Gold is really being, why is it gold didn't go up 34? Gold underperformed the S&P index in a year of political unrest and massive rampant inflation. It's the one year in 40 years gold should have gone up in price. Why? Because everyone looking for a non-sovereign store of value grabbed the crypto gold. They occupy the same niche: non-sovereign sound money store of value, not related to cash flows, can't be mocked with. But the problem is gold can be corrupted. Gold is corrupted by gold miners and gold brokers and gold dealers. Bitcoin can't be corrupted in that way because you can take possession of your own bitcoin, and the bitcoin miners can't make anymore. So people say bitcoin is fixing things. Fix the money, fix the world. Bitcoin is gradually demonetizing these other assets. And the idea is to return rationality, to make things more rational. If people start buying bitcoin instead of buying a second investment property, the price of property will go down for people that want a first home. That's the idea. If people start buying bitcoin instead of bonds, the price of bonds will come down, the yield will come up. And if you want risk-free yield, you'll be able to buy that yield. Used to be a million dollars got you a bond that paid you $50,000 a year. Now you need $20 million or $10 million to get a bond that pays $50,000 a year. Your retirement just went from costing you a million to costing you 10 million. So bitcoin is demonetizing some of these other assets. And the stock market, all these meme stocks, these are all symptoms of too much money and the sky-high P/E ratios. So the big picture, the big idea here, Tucker, is the average American, the average wage earner, is forced to take their life savings and gamble it in the stock market in order to avoid losing their life savings. My 83-year-old father has to guess which stock is going to go up this week and whether Exxon is better than British Petroleum or better than Apple or not so good as Google, in order to not lose his life savings. Because if he puts it into the bank, he gets paid 0.1 percent interest and it loses 25 percent of its purchasing power a year. And people aren't stupid. They know that things are going up faster than two percent a year or four percent a year or five percent a year. So we're stampeding an entire generation into either at best investing in stocks, or at worst gambling with meme stocks and gambling with crypto random dog coins, because no one has a savings account they trust. Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace offering a savings account. You're not gambling on the next product release of Apple versus Google and whether Amazon will get unionized and whether this pipeline will get approved. That's not right. And if you put all your money in the S&P index, all the CEOs print more stock and dilute your money. So you don't have to do that. All you're buying is you're buying one 21 millionth of the monetary energy in the network forever. The product of bitcoin is just you're going to buy a bit of money and hold it forever. And that's the product. And it's a very simple product. Should last for ten thousand years.

You're too kind. That's true. Bitcoin, I mean the entire subject is fascinating. I think you'd love it if you get more into it because it's Austrian economics plus technology plus political theory plus philosophy plus elements of human rights. The entire bitcoin coalition, it's your people on one side. Jack Dorsey, they see it as economic empowerment for billions of people. You have people on the other side that are rampant Austrian economists, they're the freedom fighters, the John Locke types in the world, the property rights people, the libertarians. And then the engineers. I just like the idea of a stable store of value that can't be messed with. Everyone's looking for that. That's the foundation upon which you build your life. Build on granite with steel. So bitcoin is crypto steel. It's like a steel ship versus a wooden ship or a balsa ship. I'll take this deal. That's the idea. And we didn't have it for a thousand years. We never had it before. Before, you have to build with crumbling sand on swamps that just sink underneath you. What causes so much passion, what causes people to be willing to do anything to make this successful, is this thought that we finally found something true and beautiful with integrity that gives us control of our life back in a world where we feel like we've lost control to politicians, we've lost control to circumstances. And everyone's looking for some way, something they can believe in that's truly theirs.