Did Michael Saylor Give Up on Bitcoin? | Anthony Pompliano

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**Anthony Pompliano** (1:00)
Michael Saylor has sold 32 Bitcoin and the world is asking, has Michael Saylor lost faith in Bitcoin? Will Bitcoin die? What is going to happen to Strategy? All of those questions are important, but before we get to the answers, we must first understand what exactly has happened here. Now Strategy owns over 843,000 Bitcoin in total and they sold 32 of them. That is.000037% of all Bitcoin they hold.
Just look at this chart right here to see how ridiculous it is, how small amount of Bitcoin they've actually sold. But that's not going to stop all the haters from coming out of the woodwork and saying that Michael Saylor has lost all faith. He no longer believes in Bitcoin. It is over. For example, take Peter Schiff. He says that last week MicroStrategy sold 32 Bitcoin for about $2.5 million at an average price of $77,135.
Since Bitcoin's biggest buyer has now become a seller, where will the new demand come from to sustain the pyramid? Bitcoin's already below 72k, which is about 7% below where Saylor sold.
Now, of course, there's a lot of people here that Michael Saylor has sold. I saw people talking online saying they may sell their Bitcoin if Saylor is selling his. But before you do that, it's important to understand why did Michael Saylor sell Bitcoin? The answer can be found in a very nuanced aspect of traditional finance. See all these companies that are holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet? Most of the different vendors, regulators, or different service providers, they gave zero value to that Bitcoin. The belief was that if you're never going to sell the Bitcoin, then what is it really worth? How could you say that Bitcoin has any value if you simply are going to hold it forever and you're unwilling to sell it? Don't take my word for it though, Jeff Walton had a great explanation for this. Take a listen.

**Jeff Walton** (2:43)
David, all of this has happened so far with the global banking standards, providing zero credit for Bitcoin as capital on a balance sheet.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
Right.

**Jeff Walton** (2:53)
Zero. The S&P 500 gave Strategy a B minus issuer credit rating, and they valued the $60 billion of Bitcoin on their balance sheet at zero.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:03)
Which actually seems like an opportunity because if you as an investor don't value that at zero, you value that at something else.

**Jeff Walton** (3:10)
Greater than one.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
Greater than one. All of a sudden, there is an edge there that somebody can take advantage of.

**Jeff Walton** (3:18)
Alpha is created. Yeah. That's probably the last legacy hurdle, that if that changes, the scale of capital that's going to come into Bitcoin is absolutely astronomical.
Because right now, if a bank were to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, they would be punitive on their capital requirements for the bank. So it doesn't make sense to hold. Insurance companies, same thing. They can't hold it. Like they get zero ability to leverage against it. So like, why would you hold it? I'll just, I will hold MSTR instead.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:46)
So this is what makes companies like yours, TrueNorth and Strategy actually disruptive. It's because you are doing the thing that no one else can or would otherwise do just because the bureaucracy, it hasn't supported it yet.

**Jeff Walton** (4:00)
We are transforming the asset. We are the transformers to purify the asset into different forms.

**Anthony Pompliano** (4:07)
Now, I tend to think that this is a very good way to think about this. Is if nobody is going to give you value for Bitcoin on your balance sheet, you have to show them that it does have value. And there are a couple of people across the market who explicitly called this out. Take Mark Moss as one example. He says that strategy is not Bitcoin. They're a public company navigating public equity markets. The Bitcoin sale was a maneuver to signal rating agencies and credit analysts demonstrating the tools they can and would deploy to protect preferred holders if needed. In that sense, the sale is not a change of heart. You can see this in the sample size. It's a signal the company is willing to monetize part of its Bitcoin reserve when its capital structure demands it.