Rich by Coin

I have nothing against Bitcoin. It’s a fascinating experiment, a volatile speculative asset and, for some, a lucrative trade. I do have a beef, however, with the Bitcoin maximalists, who’ve transformed a digital asset into a dogma and whose self-serving prophecies threaten to burn the unsophisticated investor. It all started back in 2021 when I challenged Michael Saylor to a debate.

The founder of MicroStrategy (now Strategy), a Bitcoin treasury company, Saylor seemed to be on every podcast and YouTube channel proclaiming that gold was worthless—a “barbarous relic,” as the maxis love to quote Keynes (who was actually talking about the gold standard)—and that Bitcoin was hurtling toward $1 million. (Saylor recently upped his price forecast to $13 million.) I challenged him not on the blockchain technology or the virtues of decentralized finance, but on financial responsibility. My concern was that such zealotry, divorced from prudence, would lead people to make catastrophic decisions.

First, as a peer-to-peer currency, Bitcoin was going to revolutionize payments. But then as fees spiked and transactions slowed, suddenly it wasn’t about buying coffee anymore. Next it was touted as a “store of value,” an inflation hedge superior to gold. When inflation took hold during the Biden administration, BTC plunged from $69k to $16k, while gold held steady and then began climbing.