Michael Saylor: if it’s not Bitcoin it will go to zero

Yesterday, former MicroStrategy CEO, and Bitcoin maximalist, Michael Saylor wrote on his Twitter profile that he believes that if something is not Bitcoin in the long run it will go to zero.

Michael Saylor confident about Bitcoin

Over a long enough timeline, if it isn’t #bitcoin, it is going to zero.

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) August 16, 2022

This overly maximalist position seems far-fetched even for someone like Saylor, but it does make sense. 

In fact, Bitcoin has been enduring for 13 years now, and right now very few believe it will lose all its value over the short to medium term. The case changes over the long term, but if it were to maintain a good value even throughout this cycle and the next one, which is to say up to 2030, it would become very unlikely that it could go to zero over the very long term, unless there are resounding technical problems. 

So it is not a question of what the value of BTC will be in the coming months or years, but in the coming decades. Or rather, to be more precise, it is a question of whether starting in the next decade the price of Bitcoin may at some point go to zero, in case it does not do so sooner. 

According to Saylor, this will not happen, neither in the short term, nor in the medium term, nor in the long term, nor in the very long term. In the short run almost everyone agrees with the fact that the price of BTC will not go to zero, while in the medium run there are a few skeptics. Over the long and very long term, the skeptics increase, but if it does not go to zero by the end of the next cycle (2028 or so) it would become very unlikely to happen over the very long term. 

In contrast, this reasoning does not apply to fiat currencies, stocks, or even bonds. This is because these have always a maturity that almost never extends over the very long term. 

Equities, on the other hand, over the very long term often end up either exiting markets or even disappearing due to bankruptcies, closures, takeovers, or other events that cause issuing companies to cease operations. 

As far as fiat currencies are concerned, there are very few that endure over the centuries. Right now among the oldest are the British pound and the US dollar, but although these are currencies that date back several centuries, they have been fiat for less than a century. 

According to some estimates, the average length of existence in the markets of fiat currencies is only 27 years, so over the decades these currencies also appear to be destined to zero out or even disappear. 

Therefore, Michael Saylor‘s reasoning makes sense, because financial assets over the very long term tend to either lose value or disappear. In contrast, Bitcoin, should it manage to hold out until at least 2030, might also be destined never to disappear, provided that major technical problems undermining its operation will be avoided in the future.