Thread by @chowcollection

I'm recording Saylor on Hannity. Stay tuned.

OK my video was bugging out, so I will post a transcript below:

Hannity: You've been hearing and reading all about #Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and I'll admit up front: I have been studying this, debating this with friends for probably hundreds of hours, this entire phenomenon. I honestly still do not understand a lot about it. I've recently

invested some money in this, but to be clear I am not in any way offering financial advice. More frankly, I'm not qualified to do it! One thing seems very clear, and that is cryptocurrency appears to be gaining more and more momentum. For example, El Salvador recently announced

residents there can pay their taxes with #Bitcoin. Silicon Valley titans, whether you like his politics or not, CEO of Twitter @jack, he's promoting it as the way of the future. So, do you know what a blockchain is? What is blockchain technology? What are the differences between

#Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a bunch of other cryptocurrencies? What is a #Bitcoin wallet? What is an exchange? One thing I can say is that the phenomenon and interest is very real. Here to break it all down is Microstrategy CEO @michael_saylor is with us. Alright: from a distance,

I have been following you, I have been studying you, I have spent hundreds of hours with two particular friends of mine, they broke me down. And I wish I knew more, I still can't explain the algorithm. I know what an algorithm is, but an algorithm that never has a final answer,

I have a hard time understanding. Why don't you break this down simply for people like me who don't fully understand it?

Saylor: Okay. Well let's start with the basic principle. People came to the United States for two things: Property, and Freedom. And #Bitcoin represents

Property and Freedom to 8 Billion people. Satoshi created a computer program that would run in a distributed fashion on computers all around the Earth, and that program creates 21 Million virtual coins in cyberspace. The way it works is, he created a perfect digital gold on an

open monetary network, and so that means if you wanted to save $1,000 and you wanted to have it beyond the reach of a company, a CEO, a government, a bank, and you wanted to have personal custody of it, you could have that with #Bitcoin. #Bitcoin is a technical solution to give

8 Billion people property rights. I can own $100 in my hand as easily as I can own $1 Billion, and we've never had that in the history of the human race! So what does it mean to El Salvador? Well in El Salvador you have a bunch of people that don't have a bank and they don't have

assets, and they don't have access to Wall Street. So when their relatives remit money back to El Salvador, they lost 10% of their money through money transfer agents. Once they get the money, they lose 10%-20% of its value a year because they're storing it in a currency, not in

an asset. The exciting thing about #Bitcoin is, #Bitcoin lets you save your money in an asset that goes up in value, and it lets you move that asset at the speed of light all around the planet. And what the president of El Salvador realized is, using the #Bitcoin network, they

could cut $1 Billion of cost in remittances every year to their people, they could put themselves on the world's first digital monetary network, and instead of their people losing 10%-20% of their value a year and 10% when they move it, they're gonna actually make money and

they're gonna be able to move that value around for free.

Hannity: Michael let me ask you this, I mean because you talk a lot about the history of sound money, and other cryptocurrencies. But you really think it's #Bitcoin. You think #Bitcoin is the breakout for a reason! Why?

Over, say, Ethereum or any other one?

Saylor: #Bitcoin is the dominant crypto-asset network. It's the oldest, it's the strongest, it's the most secure, and it was engineered to do one thing well, which is to keep track of 21 Million virtual coins in cyberspace. The other

cryptos are applications, and application networks are focused upon functionality or performance. #Bitcoin is optimized for durability and integrity, security. If I want to store $1 Billion for 1,000 years, I don't want a lot of bells and whistles on it! I just want to know it's

secure and nobody's gonna change it! So, why #Bitcoin? Because Satoshi started with a model of gold and he got rid of all the defects of gold. If you took gold and you said, You can't mine any more, you can't use it for jewelry, and nobody can rehypothecate it or short it

and you could take personal custody of it (in your head!) and no one can steal it from you—you would have a better gold. And so #Bitcoin is designed to be that long term store of value. And of course, humans have been looking for a way to store their life force in a store of

value for thousands and thousands of years. It's kind of part of the human dream.

Hannity: What do you say to critics that worry that it will lose all of its value? Or what do you say, well, clearly governments, some seem to be dead set against this. What do you say to them?

Saylor: Well first of all, it's the most successful technology in our lifetimes. It's grown faster and more powerfully than Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon, and it's a network and an asset that's held by about 150 Million people and we're adding 2 Million people a week! So,

other than the Dollar and the Euro, it's the most widely held monetary asset in the world, and there's every indication that nation states are embracing it. Jerome Powell said that it's a digital asset. Christine Lagarde said it's a digital asset. The head of the SEC taught a

class on it. I think that people understand—it's not a threat to the Dollar, by the way. What's going to happen is, the US Dollar is gonna be the world reserve currency, and it's gonna run on billions and billions of mobile devices, and the digital asset that underlies that

currency is gonna be #Bitcoin.

Hannity. Wow. I'll tell ya, my friends got me addicted. I'm a student. I'm learning. I'm still in the first chapter of the sort of like Cryptocurrency for Dummies, but I can't read enough of it. I love reading your stuff. And we appreciate you

sharing with us. Thank you.

Saylor: Yeah it's my pleasure!

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