Saylor Comments Prove Payments Won’t Drive Wall St Interest In Bitcoin
Even after 15 years of history, there are discussions around the nature of Bitcoin. Despite being presented as “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, understanding this technology beyond the payments realm and competing with commodities like gold or real estare is gaining more and more advocates. One of the most prominent proponents of this view on Bitcoin is MicroStrategyMSTR Chairman Michael Saylor.
Saylor is one of the most well-known bitcoin holders and advocates worldwide. In 2020, his company made Bitcoin the main asset of its treasury and has been systematically acquiring BTC since then. According to bitcointreasuries.net, Saylor’s MicroStrategy holds 214,246 BTC, worth around 15 billion dollars, making it one of the largest global holders.
For Saylor, there needs to be a better understanding of Bitcoin’s nature and main purpose. “People refer to it as currency or digital currency, and that’s an unfortunate historical artifact. It’s not a digital currency. It’s digital property”, Saylor explained in a CNBC interview in early March.
Wit this in mind, Saylor argued the compelling use case of this technology is “capital preservation,” so using it for payments doesn’t make that much sense for him. He compared owning bitcoin with owning real estate and argued that nobody complains about being unable to spend a fraction of their buildings.
“Medium of exchange is worth only one trillion dollars, store of value is worth a hundred trillion dollars (…) medium of exchange is a distraction (…) Bitcoin is competing with gold”, he underscored.
But being presented as an electronic cash system in its origin and elevated through the years as a borderless and global payments network declared legal tender in El Salvador and used for digital and real-life commerce, it’s expected that this new interpretation presented by Saylor received negative response from the Bitcoin community in social media channels like X.
For example, Canadian exchange BullBitcoin CEO Francis Pouliot posted a long-format answer arguing that Bitcoin is “the best medium of exchange the world has ever seen.” Pouliot explained how many people use it for payments worldwide on a daily basis and how his company has been helping them. “Wall Street games and fiat shenanigans are the distraction,” he said, referring to Saylor’s comments.
“Nearly every transaction will be performed using Bitcoin as the medium of exchange and unit of account. These payments will be executed using various methods of payment, which have varying degrees of trust and permission involved. Large payments will probably always happen on-chain, while smaller payments will be performed either via non-custodial “Layer 2″ payment protocols such as Lightning Network, custodial bearers asset protocols such as the Liquid Network or Fedimint, or using simple custodial ‘bitcoin bank accounts,'” he further detailed to me via X direct messages.
Saylor’s comments triggered a debate around the nature of Bitcoin. But they also showed how this narrative shift is part of the new kind of holders that are part of the bitcoin market.
In the early days, it was mainly cypherpunks, technologists, and geeks. The new wave of investors is more like Saylor: established businessmen finding their own use case for BTC. And it won’t necessarily fit the known narratives around Bitcoin and why it exists.
